AWS cuts prices of its R3, C4, M4 instances

Cloud infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services today announced price cuts for a few of its instances, or virtual slices of physical servers in its data centers.

The price cuts affect Amazon’s R3, C4, and M4 types of instances. AWS introduced all three of them in the past two years.

Price drops represent one of a few key strategic levers for Amazon to pull in its quest to keep ahead of competitors like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM SoftLayer. Other methods include the launch of new services and geographical expansions.

Here’s the breakdown of the price changes, as per a blog post today from AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr:

• C4 and M4 on-demand and reserved instances and dedicated hosts that run Linux are going down by 5 percent in AWS’ Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney) Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California), and US West (Oregon) regions.
• R3 on-demand and reserved instances and dedicated hosts that run Linux are going down (by an unspecified percentage) in AWS’ Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), South America (Brazil), US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California), and US West (Oregon) regions.
• R3 on-demand and reserved instances that run Linux are going down (by an unspecified percentage) in AWS’ GovCloud (US) regions designated for government customers.
• AWS is also making “smaller” reductions in the aforementioned regions for the aforementioned instances that run Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

The price drops for on-demand instances and the dedicated hosts are retroactive to January 1, while the reserved instance price cuts went into effect today, Barr wrote.