Amazon Web Service has reduced prices for its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings, the 19th time the cost of cloud-based services from the market-leading company has dropped in six years.
Price reductions vary based on geographic location and the type of service being used, but some of the largest savings are for customers using reserved instances of compute power and storage in the company's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Relational Database Service (RDS) offerings.
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A reserved instance is compute power purchased for a set period of time. The alternative to a reserved instance is an on-demand model, in which the servers can be turned on or off and customers pay on an as-needed basis. Prices of reserved instances of EC2 are reducing by 37% in some geographic areas, including the Eastern United States. On-demand pricing is dropping 10% in that same area. According to AWS' pricing calculator, high-memory on-demand instances start from 90 cents an hour for Linux/UNIX usage and $1.14 per hour for Windows usage.
Reserved instances of the company's RDS offerings were discounted up to 42% and up to 10% for on-demand use.
The company also seems to be making an appeal to enterprise customers that use a large amount of AWS products. Amazon announced that customers save money as they scale up their use of EC2. Customers with $250,000 of reserved instances get 10% off any future reserved instance purchases. Customers surpassing $2 million in reserved instances get a 20% discount on future reserved instance purchases.
This is the second price reduction in as many months from AWS.
Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social media. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.