Amazon Web Services led the infrastructure-as-a-service category in price cuts in 2013, but rivals also stepped up the race to the bottom, according to Rightscale, a cloud portfolio management company.
In a report, Rightscale tracked pricing changes for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) vendors and compared 2013 to 2012. At a high level, cloud compute prices continue to fall and the race to the bottom is good given most of IaaS spending revolves around compute.
Among the key points:
Rightscale noted:
In 2012, the November Storage Wars kicked off when Google reduced prices on storage by 20 percent on November 26. AWS followed with a 24- to 26-percent reduction on November 29, and Google responded the same day with an additional 10-percent reduction on storage. Windows Azure got into the game a week later with a 22-percent reduction in storage prices on December 5. In the space of 11 days, storage prices on 3 major public cloud providers went down by 20 to 30 percent. A couple of months later, in February 2013, Rackspace introduced new tiered pricing for storage that resulted in price reductions of as much as 25 percent.
Overall, Rightscale's report highlights what we already knew---AWS sets the price cutting pace and rivals are matching. What remains to be seen is whether this dynamic persists as Oracle launches IaaS in the summer and IBM via Softlayer and HP become more of an industry force.
My takeaways: