Microsoft on Monday announced price cuts of up to 65 percent for its newly renamed Azure cloud services.
The company is dropping prices of compute by up to 35 percent and storage by up to 65 percent. This move follows the company’s announcement of rebranding cloud services from Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure. The price changes will be effective from May 1.
“While price is important, and something that will continue to grab headlines, there are three key factors at play in cloud computing: innovation, price, and quality,” Steve Martin, general manager of Microsoft Azure wrote.
“We recognize that economics are a primary driver for some customers adopting cloud, and stand by our commitment to match prices and be best-in-class on price performance.”
With this reduction, the price cuts war continues as Microsoft has just fired the last shot. Last week, Amazon dropped AWS pricing by 65 percent following the Google’s reduction of prices of its cloud platform services. The slashed rates of AWS are effective since yesterday.
Microsoft is also reducing the price of memory-intensive Linux instances by 35 percent and Windows instances by 27 percent. Block Blob storage prices are going down by 65 percent for LRS and 44 percent for GRS.
Microsoft also announced that it is moving to “region-specific pricing.”
“We recognize that some workloads require specific placement while others are not as dependent on location,” said Martin. “This approach will help customers save additional money for workloads that have deployment flexibility.”
The company also introduced a new ‘Basic’ tier of General Purpose instances available from April 3, while the ‘Standard’ tier will cost 27 percent less. Also announced is the new Zone Redundant Storage, lower-grade options for redundancy of data
Microsoft also added that a new ‘Basic’ tier for memory-intensive instances will be available “in the coming months.”
