Microsoft slashes Azure prices up to 17% to keep up with AWS

Microsoft today announced price cuts for some of its Azure public cloud instances. The move is not surprising: It lines up with Microsoft’s assurance to customers in 2013 that it would match Azure’s prices with that of public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services, and AWS announced price cuts last week.

Azure’s D-Series of virtual machines are seeing their prices going down by 14 to 17 percent when they’re running Linux and by 10 to 13 percent if the operating system choice is Windows, according to a blog post today from Nicole Herskowitz, director of product marketing for Cloud Platform at Microsoft.

Herskowitz pointed out an interesting difference between AWS’ EC2 instances and these D-Series instances. “It is worthwhile to note that the Azure Dv2 instances … have load balancing and auto-scaling built-in at no additional charge,” she wrote. Plus, like the Google Cloud Platform, Azure has pricing by the minute, not by the hour.

Price cuts are one of a few methods in which these companies compete with each other. Other methods include feature rollouts and geographical expansions. Earlier this week, for instance, AWS said it would open a region of data centers in Canada.