You knew they were coming and here they are. A day after Google(s goog) announced sweeping price cuts — plus a sustained use model that startups seemed to love — Amazon(s amzn) Web Services cut prices for the 42nd time in history.
The cuts range widely but the picture shows the averages.
The news of these, the 42nd set of price cuts in the 8 years of Amazon’s cloud existence, came at the AWS Summit in San Francisco and ranged from an average of 51 percent cuts on S3 storage to 38 percent cuts on EC2 M3 compute instances. On Tuesday, Google which is launching a push for its Google Compute Cloud, unveiled dramatic price cuts of its own, taking on AWS at its own game. Stay tuned for more to come.
And, once again the numbers crunchers at RightScale bail me out with up-to-the-minute comparison of AWS new pricing vs. Google’s new pricing, which shows AWS three-year RIs as the cheapest option — but again, not many companies go for 3-year commitments because they don’t know what their needs will be. They also require a significant up-front investment.
When it comes to more commonly-used AWS one-year reserved instances, the price delta shifts to AWS.
When it comes to on-demand compute instances, RightScale puts it at pretty much a draw at least at the N1-standard instance level; high-memory instances diverge.
So, it looks like AWS has its low-cost-provider crown back for the most part, but don’t hold your breath. As SVP Andy Jassy told AWS Summit attendees earlier today, Amazon has cut cloud pricing tons of times “largely without any competitive pressure.” Now that there is competitive pressure, I’m betting the speed of those changes will accelerate.
This story was updated with RightScale’s pricing comparisons.
