Microsoft to cut prices on select Azure mobile, networking services
Microsoft will be trimming the prices of select Azure cloud services, effective October 1, company officials announced on September 25.
Microsoft is cutting the price of its ExpressRoute NSP private-networking service, BizTalk Services (standard), Mobile Service (standard) and basic cache, according to a blog post.
Here's the list of current and new prices:
To qualify for the reduced rates, customers need to purchase these services through Microsoft's web site. Customers with Enterprise Agreements "will continue to enjoy even lower prices," Microsoft's blog post says.
These latest cuts coincide with Microsoft's pledge to match price cuts on commodity cloud services from Amazon.
“As we committed over a year ago, Microsoft remains committed to matching AWS list prices on compute, storage and bandwidth," a Microsoft spokesperson said, in response to the reason for the cuts.
Update (September 26): A Microsoft spokesperson clarified today that “the prices drops on select Microsoft Azure services (announced on September 25) were not a direct competitive move, but were implemented to make these services even more accessible and economical for a broader range of customers.”
Update (September 26): Microsoft is cutting prices on more than just the four categories of Azure services that the company listed yesterday in the table above. Here's the full list of Azure services getting price cuts as of October 1. Others not mentioned in yesterday's blog post include CDN, Data Transfer, Media Services, Multi-Factor Authentication, Scheduler, Traffic Manager and more.
In other Azure news, Microsoft announced a new series of virtual machine (VM) sizes for Azure Virtual Machines and Web/Worker roles earlier this week. The new D-Series sizes make available up to 112 GB in memory with compute processors that are approximately 60 percent faster than Microsoft's A-Series VM sizes, officials said. The new sizes also come with up to 800 GB of local SSD disk to increase the speed of reads and writes.
Pricing for the new D-Series VMs is available here (click on the drop down for D-Series).