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AWS Cuts Some Instance Prices by 25 Percent
Several Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances will cost as much as 25 less starting next month.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) plans to slash the prices on its C4, M4 and T2 instances on Dec. 1, announced AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post Monday.
"We are reducing the On-Demand, Reserved Instance (Standard and Convertible) and Dedicated Host prices for C4, M4, and T2 instances by up to 25%, depending on region and platform (Linux, RHEL, SUSE, Windows, and so forth). Price cuts apply across all AWS Regions," Barr said.
T2 instances are what AWS calls "Burstable Performance Instances," which are designed to provide a steady level of computing power with the ability to "burst" to higher processing capacities. When the price cuts take effect, these instances will cost as much as 10 percent less for AWS' Northern Virginia region and 25 percent less for the Singapore region, Barr said as an example.
The M4 instances, which AWS classifies as general-purpose instances, will cost anywhere between 10 percent less (for the Northern Virginia, Ireland and Frankfurt regions) and 25 percent less (for the Singapore region).
Finally, the compute-optimized C4 instances will see price reductions between 5 percent (for the Northern Virginia and Ireland regions) and 20 percent (for the Mumbai and Singapore regions).
The price reductions will apply automatically for users starting on Dec. 1, Barr said.
This round of cuts -- AWS' 53rd so far, according to Barr -- come despite indications that the price war between the top cloud providers may be stabilizing. Earlier this year, Tariff Consultancy Ltd. (TCL) reported that "the cost of the public cloud appears to have reached a price point which is now relatively stable," and that "the emphasis by the cloud computing provider is now increasingly on service innovation, not price."
This was recently echoed by top Microsoft cloud executive Scott Guthrie, who said at a technology conference in September that AWS and Microsoft are now "competing more on value," rather than on price.
However, less than a month after Guthrie's statement, Microsoft lowered the cost of some of its Azure instances by as much as 50 percent. That was followed shortly by Google's announcement that it was slashing some of its cloud storage costs by up to 60 percent.