It’s well known that Amazon is all about customer experience.  With a growing developer customer-base, we’re constantly striving to make it easier for developers to do just that – develop!  Last month, we launched an Amazon Web Services (AWS) SDK for Android.  “We’re really excited about the launch of the AWS SDK’s for mobile,” says Jeff Barr, Senior Web Services Evangelist, Amazon Web Services.  “As a developer myself, I’m looking forward to seeing all sorts of cool and creative AWS-powered applications show up on mobile devices in the future.”

Some highlights of the AWS SDK for Android include:

• Storage – developers can store and retrieve any amount of data using Amazon S3
• Database – developers can add a highly available, scalable, and flexible non-relational data store using Amazon SimpleDB with little or no administrative burden
• Messaging – developers can integrate reliable, highly scalable mobile-to-mobile communication into applications using Amazon SQS and Amazon SNS

The SDK includes a library, full documentation, and some sample code.  You can get the library on GitHub.  Also, in true open source fashion, AWS is open to and encourages external contributions.

Check out this blog post on the AWS blog for more details about the AWS SDK as well as an iOS SDK.  You can download the AWS SDK, access documentation, and participate in the discussion forum online here.

Finally, right now Amazon has a free usage tier available to new AWS customers to help get started in the cloud.  As of November 1, 2010, new customers can run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year, while also leveraging a new free usage tier for Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer.  AWS’s free usage tier can be used for anything you want to run in the cloud: launch new applications, test existing applications in the cloud, or simply gain hands-on experience with AWS.  Learn more here.