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Finally, the cloud pricing war has begun. I have been complaining about the AWS pricing here at Cloud Ave for some time. In my Sept, 2009 post, I argued that Amazon needs to price aggressively to capture more market share.
However, I would like to to use this post to once again voice my concern about Amazon’s EC2 pricing. For example, if I setup a small on-demand linux instance and not send ANY traffic towards or from it, I would have to pay $72.00. In my opinion, this is pretty expensive and I am hoping that the competition will eventually drive down the prices. In fact, Amazon has cut the prices of reserved instances by 30% but it is not very appealing to me because on-demand pricing, which is at the very heart of cloud computing, is still expensive. In the case of reserved instances, I am left with the traditional hosting economics and not cloud economics. If Amazon is serious about getting more SMBs and, even, enterprises, they have to price their EC2 offering aggressively.
Finally, with the official launch of Windows Azure on Monday, the competition got heated up. Microsoft priced its cloud offering very aggressively compared to what Amazon was offering at that time. For example, Windows Azure compute pricing was as follows:
- Compute = $0.12 / hour
- Storage = $0.15 / GB stored / month
- Storage transactions = $0.01 / 10K
- Data transfers = $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB
In November 2009, Amazon cut down their prices by 15% across all on-demand instance families and sizes. Today, Amazon countered the impact news cycle regarding the official availability with further reduction in their AWS data transfer prices. The pricing for data out has been reduced by 2 cents per GB. The first 10 TB has been reduced to 0.15 per GB from 0.17 per GB. The next 40 TB has been reduced to 0.11 per GB from 0.13 per GB and so on. Similarly, they have reduced Amazon Cloudfront pricing also by 2 cents per GB.
According to ChannelWeb, Microsoft is also running an Azure promotion for customers who sign up for a 6 months subscription.
For $59.95 per month, developers can get 750 hours of Azure compute time, 10 GB of storage, and one million storage transactions, along with 7 GB of inbound data transfers and 14 GB of outbound data.
The competition is really getting interesting and we can expect to see further reduction in prices by all these providers, leading to an all out pricing war. With Amazon coming up with the innovative idea of spot instances to increase the efficiency in the usage of their resources, further reduction in the pricing is possible in the future. Microsoft, with all its cash reserves and a strong desire to win the cloud game, will hit back with its own price reductions. With all these back and forth pricing reductions, the ultimate winner will be the customer. Long live price wars.
Krishnan, are you aware that Amazon offers what they call “reserved instances?
For 1 yr reservation you can have a small instance for 40,58 US$ per month, inbound traffic is free, outbound traffic is 2,1US$ for 14GB (to compare with MS offerings).
For the record these are not rock-bottom prices. A lot can be done when dealing with big q.ties of instances.
However I think comparing the price this way is misleading
First off: traffic plays a role, if not, you don’t need the Cloud, simply stated. When you compare the bandwidth with a common datacenter offerings Amazon and Microsoft make your life easier (no bursts, no funny caps etc) and savings are evident.
Secondly, Microsoft is a PaaS provider, Amazon is heading there (to PaaS) but has no tight integration with specific dev-tools.
Yes, I am aware of reserved instances. I didn’t take it into account because it is representative of traditional hosting era pricing. I am more inclined to discuss the pay as you use pricing model of cloud era.
I never said traffic doesn’t play a role. Of course, the pricing in the cloud infrastructure is heavily dependent on traffic. In fact, cloud providers are raking up their profits there.