In Response To Google, Amazon Announces Massive Price Cuts For S3, EC2, ElastiCache, Elastic MapReduce And RDS

Amazon today announced a new round of price cuts for a number of services on its cloud platform, including its S3 storage service, EC2 cloud computing platform, ElastiCache, Elastic MapReduce and RDS cloud databases that will bring the cost of running applications on Amazon’s platform closer to the new prices Google announced earlier this week.

For the first terabyte of data, Amazon’s S3 will now charge $0.03 per gigabyte on standard storage and $0.024 for reduced redundancy storage. In addition, Amazon also cut prices for its EC2 cloud computing instances by up to 40 percent.

Users who store more than 49 terabyte of data will see price cuts, too, though for standard storage, prices never drop under the $0.026 that Google now charges after it abandoned its own storage tiers in favor of a single price.

For Amazon, these are massive price drops. For the first terabyte, the price went from $0.85 per gigabyte, for example. Across the board, Amazon says, these cuts amount to savings between 36 percent to 65 percent.

amazon_s3_price_cuts

For EC2, these price cuts amount to savings of up to 40 percent. Running a standard m3.medium instance, for example, currently costs $0.113 per hour, but with the price cuts, running this instance will cost only $0.07 per hour. That’s the same as using Google’s basic n1-standard-1 instances.

These price cuts don’t apply to all instances, though. Running some of the most expensive instances like the memory-optimized cr1.8xlarge instance, for example, will still cost $3.5 per hour, even as some of the smaller memory-optimized instances get substantial price cuts. Amazon’s smallest micro instances, too, will also remain at $0.020 per hour.

Prices for reserved instances, it’s worth noting, also dropped substantially.

Amazon’s RDS database service, too, is going to see 40 percent price cuts across most instances. ElastiCache cache nodes will get 34% cheaper and Elastic MapReduce will see price cuts between 27 percent and 61 percent (that’s in addition to the EC2 price cuts).

All of these new prices will go into effect April 1st (just like Google’s price cuts).

Clearly, Google’s price offensive is taking a hold in the cloud industry. Now that Amazon has made its own round of cuts, it’s just a matter of time before Microsoft will drop its own prices.

Update: a previous version of this post just mentioned price cuts to EC2, RDS and S3. Turns out, Amazon had a few more price reductions in store. We’ve now updated this post to reflect this.