Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a range of cloud service price cuts just one day after competitor Google announced similar changes to its customer charging plans.
As of Tuesday 1 April, prices for its storage service S3 will be cut by an average of 51 per cent. Further reductions were also announced for its compute platform EC2, which will drop by 38 per cent for m3 instances, 30 per cent for c3 and between 10 and 40 per cent for older instances.
The price of AWS’ relational database offering, RDS, is dropping by an average of 28 per cent, Elasticache by 34 per cent, and Elastic MapReduce by between 27 and 61 per cent.
Andy Jassy, head of AWS, who made the announcement at the Amazon Web Services Summit in San Francisco, said: “Lowering prices is not new to us. This is something we’ve done 42 times. You can expect us to do this periodically.”
Jassy said its regular price drops were not in response to competitive pressure. However, the move follows Google's announcement at its own Cloud Platform event, also taking place in San Francisco, that it was cutting the price of Google Cloud Storage by 68 per cent, as well as the cost of its on-demand computing services by 32 per cent.
Nevertheless, Jassy claimed AWS has five times the computing power of its 14 rivals put together, pointing to a report by analyst house Gartner.
“When you look at all those capabilities, they don’t exist anywhere else,” he said.
