AWS cuts cloud bandwidth charges

Amazon Web Services has eradicated the bandwidth charges on uploading data into its cloud and tweaked prices for outbound and CloudFront data transfer.

The pricing change, announced on Wednesday, will take effect from Friday. It follows Microsoft's decision to cut inbound data bandwidth charges into its Azure cloud, which was announced on 23 June and is effective from Thursday.

"Today marks another important milestone in our continuous cost reduction strategy; we've lowered prices over a dozen times in the past four years, and today we're lowering them again," Amazon Web Services' (AWS) chief technology officer, Werner Vogels, wrote on his blog on Wednesday. "Bandwidth pricing will see a reduction that for many customers can easily lead to a 40% or 50% saving in bandwidth costs."

A full list of the pricing changes is available from the AWS blog. Additionally, prices have been reduced on outbound data and AWS's content delivery network (CDN), Amazon CloudFront.

The move was received positively by AWS customers; with user _delirium on popular developer aggregator Hacker News commenting that the pricing change makes AWS "appealing for a lot of data-analysis use cases".

Data-analysis "often has large inbound traffic, as you pull down datasets (say, some genomics data), but then comparatively little outbound traffic," they said.