Amazon announces EC2 price reductions
In its 61st AWS price reduction, Amazon on Wednesday announced price drops for Reserved Instances and M4 instances.
"In addition to reducing our prices on a regular and frequent basis, we also give customers options that help them to optimize their use of AWS," AWS evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post laying out the new changes. "Our customers use multiple strategies to purchase and manage their Reserved Instances. Some prefer to make an upfront payment and earn a bigger discount; some prefer to pay nothing upfront and get a smaller (yet still substantial) discount."
Adding to those options, AWS is adding three-year No Upfront Standard Reserved Instances for most current generation instance types. The company is also reducing prices for No Upfront Reserved Instances by up to 17 percent, for three-year Convertible Reserved Instances by up to 21 percent and for General Purpose M4 instances by up to 7 percent.
Average reductions for No Upfront Reserved Instances for Linux in representative regions:
The latest reduction comes two months after Google Cloud Platform rolled out Committed Use Discounts that were cheaper than AWS Reserved Instances.
Meanwhile, the cloud price wars appear to be moving beyond compute and into storage and databases.