Amazon cuts EC2 pricing again; maintains compete strategy with Microsoft, Google

Amazon has dropped its EC2 cloud computing services prices?for the 26th time, as the cloud giant continues to pass on the savings from its ever-growing expansion back to its customers.?

The company announced discounts of more than one-quarter for EC2 reserved instances running Linux/Unix, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server,?by as much as 27 percent. These apply to M1, M2, M3 and C1 instance families.

The price reduction of reserved instances will provide savings of up to 65 percent, compared to on-demand instances, the company said in a blog post.?

As Amazon's cloud platform increases in size and scale, the firm's margins are gradually reduced over time. The savings are then passed onto the customers who, in an age of outsourced cloud services and an increasingly number of available platforms?not limited to Google Compute Engine and Microsoft's Azure platform?could up and leave for another platform.

Amazon's Jeff Barr said in the blog post that these prices are reflected on all three reserved instance models?light, medium, and heavy utilization?on purchases made on or after March 5, being today.?

In guidance, the cloud giant said those running servers less than 15 percent of the time should stick with on-demand instances; those between 15-40 percent should opt for light utilization; between 40-80 percent for medium?utilization, and anything higher should be for heavy utilization.

Here's the breakdown of the price reductions across each instance:

(Credit: Amazon Web Services)

The?last price cut was in February?when it?lowered the on-demand pricing for EC2 instances by on average 10-20 percent.?

Last week, Amazon dropped pricing on its notifications and messaging services for its AWS platform. Both Amazon Simple Queue Services (SQS, for messages) and Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS, for notifications) have become more optimized and prices were dropped to reflect those changes.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zdnet/BTL/~3/tWYDg5RMJ3Q/

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