Azure Follows Price Slash – Reductions up to 65%
First Google announced that they would be reducing prices all across the board on their cloud services. Amazon Web Services quickly followed up by permanently discounting all of its cloud services. These cuts made many industry analysts ask the question, “How will Azure respond?” Microsoft released a brief yesterday detailing Azure price cuts in retaliation to Google and Amazon.
In a fight to win the hearts of cloud aficionados all over the world, Microsoft responded swiftly by slashing it prices up to 65%. The computing services cost has been slashed by 35%. Microsoft is also introducing another pricing tier that is called basic. This offering will not have auto scaling abilities but you can BYOAS or in English: bring your own auto scaling. This price reduction is scheduled to take effect on April 3rd. This allows Microsoft to stay competitive with the biggest public cloud vendors on the market.
Some cloud experts have noted that these companies are in a “Race to the bottom” as far as cloud service prices are concerned. While prices get lower, cloud services get more powerful. Microsoft, Google and Amazon are making the barrier to entry on this platform lower every day. Since the cloud is able to deploy to a much wider variety of people simply based on price, you can expect more cloud innovation on the way. While mobile is the future of the cloud, it is not exclusively the path to profits when using the cloud. The public cloud’s price drop could have a rippling effect throughout the entire technology industry. When cloud pricing continues to drop, it makes the platform much more enticing for organizations that shied away strictly on costs. With such large cost reductions across the board from all services, it makes sense to begin taking advantages of these resources for non-critical workloads.
