Full ack. I don't understand why GCE doesn't have the same offer there. Their free trial is too short to really test it. If you're a developer and experimenting with cloud offers on side projects, AWS is often free. That way a lot of people have some experience using AWS. I'm sure the free trial pays off well for Amazon.
But it's good if you just test a bit as a developer. Not to check if a project is valid, but to gain some experience. That way, if you hire as a company, developers more likely have AWS experience than GCE/Azure experience.
I don't agree on the free trial. I think it lets you play around a lot more than the AWS free tier -- as I said in my comment up the thread, go ahead and move the slider to the right and scale up a bit (a little -- the free trial is still quota limited to prevent abuse), see how things perform, slide it back to the left and have only used a tiny fraction of your credit.
I think you get a lot more "kick the tires" flexibility with a moderately large up-front credit.
