Amazon cuts AWS data transfer pricing in US, EU, and APAC
Google and Amazon have taken their axes to compute and storage pricing recently; now it's time for a new battle on the bandwidth front.
Outbound data transfers from several of Amazon's availability zones in the US, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region have been cut by between six percent and 43 percent, with the biggest reductions for developers serving applications from Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo -- where bandwidth has traditionally been more expensive than in Europe and the US.
With the new cuts, data transfers are still more expensive in those regions, but the gap between the other regions has been reduced. The one region that didn't get any discounts was Sao Paulo, Brazil.
The price for the first 10TB of outbound data in all US zones and all European zones has been cut by 25 percent. Singapore outbound data prices have been reduced by 37 percent, while Tokyo gets a 30 percent cut and prices in Sydney drop by 26 percent. The reductions relate to EC2 (compute) and S3 (storage) pricing.
The new price for transfers from North Virginia and Frankfurt in this tier is 9 cents per GB, while in Singapore it's 12 cents, and in Tokyo it's 14 cents. At this tier, it's a smidgeon more expensive than Microsoft's Azure bandwidth pricing.
Europe and the US get a six percent cut for the next 40TB of outbound data, while Singapore will see prices in that bracket fall by 43 percent. Tokyo and Sydney prices fall by 15 percent and 21 percent, respectively.
Amazon has also trimmed prices for the first 10TB of data transferred per month from CloudFront, its content distribution network. Prices from the US and Europe have fallen by 29 percent, while Hong Kong, the Philippines, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, and Australia have seen prices for that tier drop by 26 percent. Asia also will see cuts of four percent for the next 40TB.
The cloud company's latest reductions in data transfer prices aren't quite as drastic as those from last February but nonetheless should be welcomed by developers in these regions.
Amazon earlier this week tweaked how it charges for reserved instances on EC2, which in part is a response to Google's sustained pricing model it introduced earlier this year with the promise of no upfront costs.
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