Amazon Web Services Reduces EBS, S3 Prices, Again

Amazon (AMZN) Web Services (AWS) has taken yet another step in the oh-so-common game of Price Cut Limbo. How low can you go? In what is the public cloud provider’s 40th price cut (happy anniversary?) since its launch in 2006, AWS has reduced the pricing of both Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Block Store (EBS) Standard in all regions.

Jeff Barr, Amazon’s chief evangelist, wrote in a blog post that the company is reducing S3 prices by up to 22 percent in all regions and EBS Standard volume storage and I/O request pricing by as much as 50 percent. Exactly how much the price cut will affect partners and customers depends on the specific pricing tier and the geographic location.

The new pricing will go into effect Feb. 1.

Naturally, the largest S3 tiers will see the biggest price cuts, with those falling into the 5,000TB+ category seeing a 22 percent reduction, while the smallest cut affects the 1-50TB tier, which will experience a 6 percent price reduction. The pricing provided in the blog post affects customers in the U.S. Standard Region, but Amazon has provided a complete pricing breakdown for all of its regions.

As for EBS, the example Barr gave in his post was for the U.S. East (Northern Virginia) region, which shows a 50 percent price drop for gigabyte-per-month of provisioned storage and 1 million I/O requests. He also provided a link to a full breakdown of EBS price cuts.

The price reduction played second fiddle to the announcement of new M3 instance sizes, which include solid state disk (SSD) storage.