Microsoft cuts Azure prices

Microsoft has become the latest in a line of cloud providers to announce price cuts, making good on its promise to match cloud competitor Amazon by reducing pricing for its Azure storage by up to two-thirds.

It today introduced a new level of redundancy, Zone Redundant Storage, would be available in the next few months on Azure Block Blobs, for 3 US cents per gigabyte/ per month for the first terabyte, and US 2.8 cents for volumes between 1000 to 5000 terabytes a month.

Microsoft said the pricing was equivalent to Amazon's charges for its storage, which it dropped by just over a half last week.

General purpose Azure virtual machines will be up to 27 per cent cheaper from April 3, with the memory-intensive Linux instances costing over a third less from May 1, Microsoft said.

Microsoft said its Azure and Linux VM pricing matches Amazon's, and in the case of the memory-intensive virtual machines, is 9 to 13 per cent lower. However, Azure and AWS virtual machines instances are not directly comparable due to differing configurations.

Microsoft also today introduced a new tier of general purpose machines called Basic. The machines do not include load-balancing or auto-scaling and are to be used for development, testing and batch processing applications.

One big change in Microsoft's announcement is a move to region-based pricing for virtual machines.

General purpose Linux virtual machines cost between 4.4 US cents and 4.7 US cents per hour and month in the United States regions with the updated pricing.

In Asia-Pacific Southeast and Eastern regions, pricing goes up to 5.8 US cents per hour and month.

Storage pricing will not be region based, Microsoft said.

The cloud computing giants have been battling to outdo each other with price cuts in order to attract more customers worldwide.

Google last week slashed prices for its cloud computing services by up to 85 per cent across the board.