Now its Microsoft's turn to slash cloud pricing

Yet another price cut is set to shakeup the cloud computing market, with news today that Microsoft will cut prices for Azure by up to 65 percent this week.

Microsoft moved to keep its promise to match Amazon prices, announcing that Azure prices will fall this week on April 3 US time. The cuts will see Azure prices fall by up to 35 percent for computer and up to 65 percent for storage.

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed the reduced prices for Azure are applicable for Australia.

The attack on Amazon includes a new table of pricing released by Microsoft which directly compares the new Azure prices with AWS.

The other news announced today is region-specific pricing. Microsoft claims this will "help customers save additional money for workloads that have deployment flexibility," according a blog post.

"We recognize that some workloads require specific placement while others are not as dependent on location," the Microsoft blog states.

The cuts follow major reductions by Google and Amazon. Last week Google announced cuts of up to 85 percent, as well as volume discounts.

From today AWS prices for Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) will be up to 40 percent cheaper in some cases. It is the 42nd time Amazon has reduced the price of AWS.

News of the Azure price drop was welcomed by Graeme Strange of Australian Azure provider Readify, though he questioned whether price was a barrier to adoption.

"To be honest, I haven't heard that pricing is the major barrier," he said. "Clearly everyone wants to remain competitive, when someone drops price everyone's going to want to follow suit, but I don't know it's necessarily barrier to entry for customers."

"I actually think functionality is a big one. What do I get when I move to one platform over the other? In some cases location of the service is important, whether it's within Australian borders or not. There are issues around functionality, location that I think are issues most people are considering before priced."

Also welcoming the news was general manager of Ensyst, Nick Sone, who expected to see "our Azure services revenue grow at an even faster rate" as a result.

Today's announcement is not the Azure price reduction by Microsoft. In January Microsoft cut pricing for storage by up to 20 percent.

In November last year Microsoft announced its lowest Azure pricing with its three-year licensing option called Server and Cloud Enrollment (SCE).