Microsoft lowers Azure service prices

Microsoft has announced significant price cuts for its cloud service Azure. The decreases range from 27 to 65 percent. With this, Microsoft is responding to similar price drops from its biggest competitors Amazon and Google.

For the packages for virtual machines, prices drop by 3 percent to 27 percent, depending on the chosen instance. In many cases, Azure’s prices match those of comparable Amazon AWS instances, and especially for memory-intensive instances, prices would be 9 to 14 percent lower, Microsoft claims. The company has also rebranded its cloud platform from Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure.

In terms of online storage, Microsoft has completely aligned prices with those of its biggest competitor Amazon. The price war was sparked off last week by Google, which slashed prices for its Compute Engine and App Engine by 32 and 30 percent, respectively. In addition, prices at Google are automatically lowered as workloads run longer.

Amazon followed suit with its own massive price cut for its EC2, S3, RDS, ElastiCache and Elastic MapReduce services. All new prices from the cloud providers will take effect on April 1.