The cloud price wars are continuing to wage on.
A week after Amazon axed prices across a number of its cloud services, effective April 1, Microsoft announced price cuts of its own.
Microsoft officials said on March 31 that they are chopping the price of compute by 27 percent to 35 percent; and storage by 44 percent to 65 percent. Microsoft also cut the pricing for memory-intensive Linux instances by 35 percent and Windows instances by 27 percent. Block Blob storage prices are also going down: up to 65 percent for LRS and 44 percent for GRS, according to Microsoft.
The price changes take effect May 1, 2014.
In April 2013, Microsoft officials committed to match Amazon Web Services on price for all "commodity" services, including compute, storage and bandwidth.
Here's Microsoft chart comparing general-purpose virtual machine pricing with Amazon's AWS prices:
Microsofts blog post contains additional charts comparing prices for other Azure and AWS services.
Microsoft also announced some service changes today. Specifically, the company:
Microsoft also will be moving to region-specific pricing for users who have deployment flexibility for specific workloads, officials said.