As with other Amazon Web Services tools, users can easily access it online and will only pay for the computing power and storage they consume. By increasing the number of people who have access to large data sets, Amazon hopes to level the playing field between larger companies and organizations and smaller ones.

The public data sets helps "make it possible for our customers to be successful based on their ideas, not on their resources," said Adam Selipsky, Vice President of Product Management and Developer Relations for Amazon Web Services, in a .

Data sets that are currently available include Human Genome data, several years of United States Census Data and labor statistics.

"Public Data Sets on AWS will enable me and many of my colleagues to collaborate with each other by sharing our commonly used data sets, research environments and tools," said Dr. Peter Tonellato from the Harvard Medical School in the press release.

"I only pay for the compute time I use, and more importantly I can spend more time focusing on research, not downloading and setting up computational infrastructure," he added.