AWS Re:Invent: AWS to slash cloud storage costs by 25 per cent

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is to slash the cost of its S3 storage service by around 25 per cent from the start of next month, the cloud giant has confirmed.

The price cut was announced during the opening keynote of the AWS Re:Invent 2012 customer and partner conference, which is taking place in Las Vegas this week and has attracted more than 5,000 delegates from across the globe.

The company's senior vice president, Andy Jassy, said the company has cut the price of its services on multiple occasions since its launch in 2006, thanks to its economies of scale.

"As we have more customers, we have to buy more infrastructure, but we get economies of scale, so we can lower our infrastructure costs and we can lower our prices and drive more customers [to us]," he told delegates.Customers are voting with their cold hard cash and moving to AWS."[This has allowed us to] lower prices on 23 different occasions over the last few years, largely without any competitive price pressure to do so."

Jassy said the move should result in a "24 to 27 per cent" price reduction for S3 customers.

News of the S3 price reduction, which will come into effect across the globe on 1 December, comes hot on the heels of the firm's 18 per cent cloud instances price cut, which was announced earlier this month.

Speaking to IT Pro, Iain Gavin, UK and Ireland country manager at AWS, said the firm's history of price cuts make it something of an anomaly within the IT industry.

"It gets the attention of customers [and] prospects that we haven't quite reached out to yet...so it helps us on that front," he said.

"[It also means] we're much cheaper than the old way of doing things and customers are voting with their cold hard cash [and moving to AWS]."

Jassy also used his keynote to hit out at "old guard" tech firms intent on pushing private cloud to end users, and unveiled a new addition to Amazon's plethora of services in the form of its new data warehousing offering, Redshift.