Microsoft cuts Azure cloud pricing

Customers of Microsoft's Azure cloud platform will receive substantial price reductions from next month, in a move aimed squarely at Microsoft rival Amazon Web Services.

While Microsoft has yet to publish the full list of price reductions, the company's director of Azure product marking Nicole Herskowitz said the cost of Linux instances will drop between 14 and 17 percent.

Windows virtual machines, which include the operating system licence, will also fall by 10 to 13 percent. Herskowitz said Microsoft was dropping prices to remain competitive with Amazon Web Services. 

AWS also tweaked its pricing model this month, adding another type of Reserved Instance.

Called Scheduled Instance, the new type of virtual machine lets users reserve Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) capacity over one or three year terms and use it at any time. 

Using such reserved instances for predefined blocks of time on a recurring basis over a one-year period would see prices fall five to ten percent below equivalent On-Demand EC2 rates, Amazon claimed.

Scheduled Instances will be available in the US East and West regions, as well as Europe, and support the four different types of virtual machines.