Microsoft chops Azure prices to match Amazon's latest reductions

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:

• Added a new tier of General Purpose instances called Basic that will be available starting April 3 and cost up to 27 percent less than the corresponding instances in use today.
• Created a new Basic tier for memory-intensive instances that will be available "in the coming months"
• Added a new redundancy level for Block Blob storage, named Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) which will be available starting May 1. ZRS keeps data durable by storing up to three copies of your data across multiple facilities," and will be priced 37.5 percent lower than GRS, officials said.

Microsoft also will be moving to region-specific pricing for users who have deployment flexibility for specific workloads, officials said.