Microsoft Azure Matches Amazon’s Price Cuts And Introduces New “Basic” Tier
April 1, 2014
Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Frederic Lardinois.
After Google’s drastic price cuts for its cloud computing services, Amazon quickly matched them. Given that Microsoft always promised to match prices, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the company today announced its own round of massive price cuts. Prices for compute on Microsoft Azure (previously known as Windows Azure) dropped by up to 35 percent and Microsoft cut storage prices by up to 65 percent. With these changes, Microsoft matches all of Amazon’s prices and sometimes undercuts them by 1 to 6 percent.
“We recognize that economics are a primary driver for some customers adopting cloud, and stand by our commitment to match prices and be best-in-class on price performance,” the company writes in its announcement today. Today’s announcement comes just a few days ahead of Microsoft’s big BUILD developer conference, but as Microsoft general manager for Azure Steven Martin writes today, “I’ve yet to meet a developer who travels just to hear about pricing updates, so you won’t see us take the stage at BUILD and use the opening moment to announce a price cut.”…
The new prices will go into effect on May 1st — a month after Amazon’s and Google’s pricing changes. In addition to the new pricing, though, Microsoft also today announced a new service level for Azure underneath its Standard tier. These “Basic” instances will cost up to 27 percent less than the regular instances and have similar specs…
Read more from the source @ http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/31/microsoft-azure-matches-amazons-price-cuts-and-introduces-new-basic-tier/
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