Amazon goes on a price-slashing spree, maxing out at a 61% cut

SAN FRANCISCO — Just a day after Google cut prices across the board for its public cloud services, market leader Amazon Web Services made a similar move.

Of course it did. This is the 42nd price cut for the Amazon cloud, Amazon Web Services head Andy Jassy said at the Amazon Web Services Summit in San Francisco today.

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Here’s the breakdown:

• The popular S3 object-storage service went down an average of 51 percent.
• The prices also went down for multiple EC2 raw compute services: 38 percent for m3 instances, 30 percent for c3, and 10-40 percent for older instances, like m1, m2, c1, and cc2. These price cuts apply to Linux, and comparable pricing changes will come for Windows and other operating systems, Jassy said.
• The price of the Relational Database Service, or RDS, is going down 28 percent on average.
• The Elasticache caching service is dropping 34 percent.
• The Elastic MapReduce, or EMR, product — a version of the open-source Hadoop software for storing lots of different kinds of data — saw price drops of 27 percent to 61 percent.

“I think you can and should expect us to do this periodically” in the years to come, Jassy said, referring to price cuts.

Then again, it does make sense for Amazon to make such a wide range of price cuts all at once, as Google made a splash by doing so at its public-cloud promotional event in San Francisco yesterday.

The cuts came alongside news of new instances and security clearance for Amazon’s cloud.