Stay on Top of Emerging Technology Trends Get updates impacting your industry from our GigaOm Research Community

Amazon definitely wants enterprises to adopt its cloud, but it’s still wooing little startups too. This week, it said it will issue $1,000 in Amazon Web Services credit to any student who completes qualifying edX certifications in entrepreneurship. EdX is the online education platform backed by MIT, Harvard, and a raft of other universities.

AWS credits are available for many things — if you were a registered attendee of AWS Re:Invent last month, you can get $25 in AWS credits for filling out a survey. If you have some sort of service snafu, credits are often issued as make-goods.

But now that there are public cloud competitors to AWS, watch for more offers from [company]Google[/company], [company]IBM[/company], [company]Microsoft[/company], all of which want to woo startups and enterprises alike to their cloud platforms. An edX spokeswoman said it has never done a cloud credit deal like this one before, but is open to working with other providers.

Hoping a thousand flowers bloom

For some time now, young companies that met certain criteria could get $25,000 in credit toward [company]Amazon[/company] cloud services. In September, [company]Google[/company] raised that bar to $100,000 in Google Cloud Platform credits, again for “qualified” startups. Not to be outdone, IBM last month said qualifying startups could get $120,000 in credit that can be used for SoftLayer infrastructure or BlueMix PaaS.

[company]Microsoft[/company] issues Azure cloud credits of up to $150 per month with MSDN subscriptions and there are other credits–up to $5,000 per month — for startups using its BizSpark cloud accelerator program.

And in terms of wooing developers learning their trade, Google also offers $500 in credit to students who take its App Engine Udacity course.

Clearly these vendors know that customer acquisition is critical and that a startup is using brand X Cloud the hope is it’ll stay there and start using more basic and higher end services.

It’s a great time to be a startup.