Microsoft has long said it would match AWS’s prices for compute, storage and bandwidth. Earlier this month, Amazon dropped the price of some of its general purpose, compute- and memory-optimized EC2 machines. It doesn’t come as a major surprise then that Microsoft is now also dropping the prices for some of its virtual machines by between 10 and 17 percent.
Microsoft’s price cuts focus on its updated D-series instances. Current prices for these so-called Dv2 compute-optimized instances start at just over $100 per month and top out at around $1,800 per month.
Microsoft says these updated Dv2 machines use CPUs that are about 35 percent faster than its older v1 instances.
For the time being, Microsoft isn’t changing the prices of its more general purpose A-series machines. These start at $13 per month for an instance with a single core and 0.75 GB of RAM. Microsoft’s prices for these machines are mostly still in line with Amazon’s.
Google Cloud Platform still undercuts many of these prices, though, especially after you apply its sustained use discounts.
As Microsoft rightly notes, though, instance pricing should only be one reason to opt for a given cloud computing platform. It notes that its customers often opt for Azure because of its hybrid capabilities or because they want to utilize some of Azure’s Platform-as-a-Service offerings.
The same, though, can probably also be said for Microsoft’s competitors. And with projects like Lambda, AWS is now also offering some service that do away with having to provision servers to begin with.