Over the past week, SAP and Amazon Web Services announced a number of alliances. Earlier this week, SAP said they would sell Afaria, its mobile management software, on the AWS Marketplace. Last Friday, SAP and AWS announced that SAP customers can now deploy their SAP solutions on SAP EC2 instances in production and non-production environments for both Linux and Windows environments.

Now comes the news that developers may now set up a HANA database on Amazon Web Services at no cost. This is huge. HANA is the in-memory database that SAP is positioning to compete directly with Oracle and SAP.

It’s a major coup for the SAP Mentor community, and people like Vijay Vijayasankar, John Applebee, Jon Reed and Dennis Howlett, who have been pushing SAP for the past two years to take this kind of step.

It’s noteworthy, too, as SAP is now without question the most developer friendly enterprise technology company in the market. IBM nor Oracle nor HP can match right now the level of commitment that SAP is making to developers.

Developers who sign up are able to run their own pre-configured HANA instance to create their data analysis application. The signup page includes detailed instructions for the setup.

SAP is making three different sizes available for developers. As noted on the SAP community network site, you can use the AWS pricing calculator, which is pre-configured for 4 hours of daily usage on the smallest available size.

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