Amazon Web Services Drops Its Pricing On Messaging And Notification Services

Amazon Web Services has once again dropped its pricing. This time the decrease is for two of its services:  Simple Queue Service (SQS) and the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS).

According to AWS, SQS offers a scalable, hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers. Developers can  move data between distributed components of their applications that perform different tasks without losing messages or requiring each component to be always available. Amazon SQS is designed to make it easy to build an automated workflow, working in close conjunction with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and the other AWS infrastructure web services.

SNS is a web service to set up, operate and send notifications from the cloud. It provides developers with a capability to publish messages from an application and deliver them to subscribers or other applications. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

The price decreases are as follows:

  • SQS API prices will decrease by 50%, to $0.50 per million API requests.
  • SNS API prices will decrease by 17%, to $0.50 per million API requests.
  • The SQS and SNS free tiers will each expand to 1 million free API requests per month, up 10x from 100K requests per month.

The new prices take effect tomorrow and are applicable in all AWS Regions with the exception of the AWS GovCloud (US).

The price drops are in line with AWS strategy. It consistently decreases prices for all aspects of its services such as S3 storage. AWS believes it can engage in a “virtuous circle” as it buys more servers at scale. The scaling effect means it gets volume discounts and more compute power that it can optimize for the customer. With those efficiencies, it gives AWS room to be more flexible in its pricing with its various services.

But the price decrease also illustrates how fierce competition is getting. Google Compute Engine (GCE) and Windows Azure also continue to drop prices. OpenStack will lead to more infrastructure availability. The competition is only increasing, and a race to drop pricing can only have so much value.