Amazon Plans for Cuts to Most Cloud Services

It seems as though Amazon Web Services is usually leading the charge when it comes to price cuts, but Google jumped the gun on the latest price war earlier this week when it announced significantly price cuts to a variety of services. Amazon followed suit shortly thereafter, with a sweeping price cut affecting most of its cloud services.

Effective April 1, Amazon will reduce the prices of Amazon EC2, S3, the Amazon Relational Database Service and Elastic MapReduce.

On-demand EC2 pricing reductions vary, from 10 percent to 40 percent, and reserved instance pricing was reduced by 10 percent to 40 percent. The exact price reduction varies on the specific service and the operating system being used.

“Also keep in mind that as you scale your footprint of EC2 Reserved Instances, that you will benefit from the Reserved Instance volume discount tiers, increasing your overall discount over On-Demand by up to 68 percent,” wrote Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at Amazon Web Services, in a blog.

In terms of S3 pricing, the price reduction is from 36 percent to 65 percent, with the greatest reduction being at the lowest end of the pricing tier (under 1TB of data). According to Barr, the average price reduction is by 51 percent. Of course, the pricing Barr wrote about is specific to the US Standard Region. Pricing in other regions may vary.

Amazon also announced price reductions for RDS by an average of 28 percent, ElastiCache by an average of 34 percent and Elastic MapReduce from 27 percent to 61 percent.

“It might be useful for you to remember that an added advantage of using AWS services such as Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 over using your own on-premises solution is that with AWS, the price reductions that we regularly roll out apply not only to any new storage that you might add but also to the existing data that you have already stored in AWS. With no action on your part, your cost to store existing data goes down over time,” Barr noted.