Microsoft Cuts Azure Pricing Just Days After Amazon Slashes Its Own

Microsoft has followed Amazon’s lead and cut the price of its Azure cloud services and made a number of changes to its cloud services portfolio.

Related: Microsoft Azure beats out Amazon Web Services in cloud service performance test

The Redmond-based firm announced that its compute prices have dropped by between 27 per cent and 35 per cent whereas its storage levies are down by between 44 per cent and 65 per cent.

“While price is important, and something that will continue to grab headlines, there are three key factors at play in cloud computing: innovation, price, and quality. Innovation and quality will prove far more important than commoditization of compute and storage. Vendors will ultimately extol their track records for building and running services far more than their prices and SLAs,” stated Steven Martin in an Azure blog post.

As well as that, the price of memory-intensive Linux instances has decreased by 35 per cent and Windows instances, in comparison, are down 27 per cent. Martin promised that the company would continue to offer an unrivalled user experience through “massive investments” in both infrastructure and research & development.

“It means continuing to grow our developer and partner ecosystems. Simply put, it means devoting the bulk of our efforts to delivering innovation and a quality experience for our customers, developers, and partners,” Martin added.

The new additions come in the virtual machines sector where new General Purpose instances called Basic come in on 3 April and cost 27 per cent less than the same ones being used right now. Microsoft has also added a new Basic tier for memory-intensive instances that will be introduced “in the coming months.”

Lastly it will be introducing a new redundancy level for Block Blob storage that is dubbed Zone Redundant Storage [ZRS] and keeps data durable by storing three copies across multiple centres. This will be priced 37.5 per cent lower than GRS and is being introduced from 1 May.

The company is also migrating towards a model based on region-specific pricing for those users that have deployment flexibility linked to specific workloads. All the price cuts come into force from 1 May and be sure to watch Amazon’s prices to determine the next time Microsoft’s will fall.