Thursday's price cut sees Amazon go after Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud by reducing the cost of renting Windows on-demand servers by up to 26 percent – bringing Bezos's big yellow cloud within a whisker of Ballmer's blue sky.
"The price drop continues the AWS tradition of exploring ways to reduce costs and passing the savings along to you," the company wrote in a blog post.
Prices are effective from 1 April 2013. The reduction applies across Amazon's Standard (m1), Second-Generation Standard (m3), High-Memory (m2), and High-CPU (c1) instance families.
Microsoft's cloud fields a fraction of the types of rentable instance available on Amazon, so a full comparison is difficult. Here's how the prices look for Amazon's m1 family versus Azure's standard instances*.
- Small: $0.08 per hour versus Amazon's $0.091
- Medium: $0.16 vs $0.182
- Large: $0.32 vs $0.364
- XL: $0.64 vs $0.728
If Amazon gets lower, Microsoft may not have the will to reduce its prices further: remember, Azure is currently in "preview" mode, which means "customers are charged discounted rates for Virtual Machines during preview," Azure's FAQ reads.
How could Amazon have further reduced its prices? Well, it could have a) extracted more efficiency out of its famously advanced global data center infrastructure, or b) received a discount from Microsoft on the various Windows licenses it buys to let it sway developers away from Azure.
We somehow doubt that the answer is b).
Source: The Register
