Amazon Cuts AWS Prices As Cloud Competition Races To Zero

Amazon has cut the price of its online storage and compute services again, the 42nd time that the company has slashed prices on Amazon Web Services.

The price cut comes as little surprise, coming at the AWS Summit in San Francisco today. The announcement arrives one day after Google slashed its prices for Google Cloud Platform. The Amazon price cuts to AWS include:

A 51% reduction average for Amazon S3 with tier prices decreasing from 36% to 65%.
For Amazon E2, the M3 instance type will see a 38% reduction while the C3 instance will have a 30% price decrease. Other EC2 instances (M1, M2, C1 and CC2) will be reduced between 10% and 40%.
Amazon RDS (Relational Database) will be reduced 28% on average. The ElasticCache will have a 34% average reduction in price.
Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) will have between a 27% and 61% reduction.

With the price cuts from Amazon and Google, developers can assuredly expect Microsoft to reduce its Azure cloud prices in the near future, perhaps next week at the Microsoft Build developer conference in San Francisco. The three companies are locked into a war for developer attention, cutting prices in what has become and cut throat market for cloud and computing services. In the end, everybody will benefit when the cloud providers start competing and moving prices down to commodity levels that can be accessible to everyone.