Amazon drops AWS prices on notifications, messages

A couple of features Amazon Web Services just got a little bit cheaper after the retail turned cloud giant lowered the prices of its messaging and notification services.

Amazon Simple Queue Services (SQS) launched in 2004 and Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) was out in 2010, and has since then increased in scalability and elasticity. Now these features have become more optimized on Amazon's own systems, the company is changing the prices to reflect this to end application developers.

In a nutshell, the greater the company's cloud service becomes in size, the lower the prices will be overall.

Here are the new prices: 

• SQS API prices will decrease by 50 percent, to $0.50 per million API requests.
• SNS API prices will decrease by 17 percent, to $0.50 per million API requests.
• The SQS and SNS free tiers will each expand to 1 million free API requests per month, up ten-fold from 100,000 requests per month.

In a note on its blog, the company said that customers use SQS "as a buffer ahead of databases and other services," while other customers "combine SNS and SQS to transmit identical messages to multiple queues."

While SQS is used closely with Amazon's EC2 service and other parts of the cloud offering, SNS sends notifications and messages from an application to develier them to other applications or users.

But the move is part of an aggressive strategy to compete with other rival firms, notably Microsoft's Azure and Google's Compute Engine services.

The new prices take effect today and are applicable in all Amazon Web Service regions, except AWS GovCloud in the U.S.