Microsoft has cut the price of virtual machines and storage on its Azure cloud platform for the second time in four months.
The discount is specifically for A1 Basic instances, with prices dropping up to 61 percent, and F Series instances up to 24 percent.
A1 Basic is for entry-level instances meant for smaller production workloads, or development and testing, that don't need load balancing, auto-scaling or abundant memory.
F Series instances, on the other hand, offer a high CPU to memory ratio and are more appropriate for medium traffic web servers, network appliances, batch processors and application servers.
Azure Storage products also got a price cut of up to 26 percent for Hot Block Blob Storage and up to 38 percent for Cool Block Blog storage.
As noted by Lifehacker, the price cuts extend to Azure instances in Australia. The new prices are already in effect.
Director of product marketing for Azure Venkat Gattamneni said price cuts for D-series general-purpose instances were also on the way.
"We strive hard at Azure to offer you the best value in one of the most cost-effective ways in the public cloud. We believe in providing a comprehensive cloud platform that not only enables customers to innovate rapidly, but to also do so at the best possible prices.
"To that end, today we are happy to announce significant price reductions on several Azure Virtual Machine families and Storage types. We hope this will further lower the barrier to entry for our customers and accelerate cloud transformation."
The last time Microsoft dropped Azure prices was in October, slashing the price of A1 and A2 virtual machines by 50 percent. A month later, cloud rival Amazon Web Services followed suit with a 25 percent price cut to its Elastic Compute Cloud.
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