Amazon slashes cloud computing prices

Amazon will drop prices on most of its cloud computing services starting April 1, the company announced today, just one day after rival Google similarly outlined major price cuts.

The price cuts range from 10 percent to 65 percent, Andrew Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services, told a conference for Amazon web developers in San Francisco.

This marks the 42nd price reduction for AWS in the company's eight year lifespan.

From the start of April, AWS will cut Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) pricing by 10 to 40 percent for M1, M2, C1 and CC2 instances.

Amazon's EC2 M3 instances will drop 38 percent in price, while C3 instances will be cut by 30 percent. Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) pricing will drop by an average of 51 percent, depending on the tier of service.

Amazon's Relational Database Service will cost on average 28 percent less, ElastiCache around 34 percent less, and Elastic MapReduce, AWS' Hadoop service, will cost 27 percent to 61 percent less depending on instance type.

The news follows Google's announcement yesterday that it would cut prices for products in its cloud platform by up to 85 percent. 

And earlier this week, Cisco Systems announced plans to spend US$1 billion over the next two years to build a new cloud services business.

With Reuters