Amazon cuts prices (again) on key web services

When Amazon Web Services isn’t adding new services, it’s cutting prices on those it already offers. Late on Monday, the company said it is cutting the price of its Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 and several related services. The news, as usual, was posted on the company’s AWS blog.

AWS is the market leader, by far, in public cloud computing infrastructure although it is facing increased competition from OpenStack and other public cloud offerings. The company has been clear in its desire to get as many people as possible using its compute infrastructure. The bevy of new services — as well as these price actions — is one way to do that.

The EC2 reduction varies according to the type of compute instance and by region. Reserved instance prices are cut by as much as 37 percent and on-demand instance pricing up to 10 percent, according to an Amazon spokeswoman.

AWS is also reducing the price for its relational database service (RDS) — reserved instances of RDS prices will fall by 42 percent with on-demand RDS instance and ElastiCache prices coming down by up to 10 percent.  ElastiCache enables users to deploy in-memory caches which allow faster data retrieval than disk-based caching.

AWS evangelist Jeff Barr said this is the 19th time Amazon has cut AWS prices in six years.  Last month, it cut prices on its S3 storage service. As for new offerings, this year alone, Amazon added a new AWS Storage Gateway to facilitate easy upload of data from a customer’s data center to the cloud; its DynamoDB NoSQL database service; a new workflow service; and free micro-instances of Windows running on EC2.

The speed with which Amazon rolls out new services, and commoditizes them with its pricing, is its chief advantage. But the company also faces worry that as it adds new services it will start competing with partners that base their higher-level services on its infrastructure.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user dotcompals

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