AWS makes 53rd price cut, offers savings on EC2 compute

Amazon Web Services is cutting prices across multiple instances of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), with savings of up to 25 percent.

"We are reducing the on-demand, reserved instance (standard and convertible) and dedicated host prices for C4, M4, and T2 instances by up to 25 percent, depending on region and platform (Linux, RHEL, SUSE, Windows, and so forth)," the company's chief evangelist, Jeff Barr, wrote in a blog post.

He said price cuts would take effect from 1 December across all AWS regions. "By my count, this is our 53rd price reduction."

While CRN understands the reductions will also take effect in the Sydney region, AWS was unable to provide any details on the specific changes for Australia. Barr's blog did outline savings in other regions, showing a disparity in the size of the reductions in different parts of the world.

C4 will see reductions of up to 5 percent in US East (Northern Virginia) and EU (Ireland) and 20 percent in Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and Asia Pacific (Singapore)

M4 will see reductions of up to 10 percent in US East (Northern Virginia), EU (Ireland), and EU (Frankfurt) and 25 percent in Asia Pacific (Singapore).

T2 will see reductions of up to 10 percent in US East (Northern Virginia) and 25 percent in Asia Pacific (Singapore).

"As always, you do not need to take any action in order to benefit from the reduction in on-demand prices," Barr wrote. "If you are using billing alerts or our newly revised budget feature, you may want to consider revising your thresholds downward as appropriate."

The reduction in prices comes two months after AWS' chief rival, Microsoft Azure, revealed price cuts up 50 percent on customers running its simplest virtual machines.

Public cloud prices have been relatively stable throughout 2016, a far cry from 2014, when Amazon, Microsoft and Google waged a price war.

The most recent data from US-based Synergy Research Group showed that AWS continues to dwarf its closest competitors in the worldwide infrastructure-as-a-service market, despite the best efforts of Microsoft, Google and IBM to catch up.

Microsoft and Google have "much higher growth rates" than AWS, though coming off a lower base.

"In aggregate the big four cloud providers – Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Google – continue to control well over half of the worldwide market and all continue to grow their market share," according to the research company.