Amazon reduces price of cloud storage, Microsoft rushes to match

Earlier this week, Amazon Web Services reduced its prices for its S3 cloud storage service and today, Microsoft is following suit with a price reduction for its own cloud storage services. Locally redundant storage on Azure now matches Amazon’s prices and Azure Storage transactions are getting a 50 percent price cut, which matches Amazon’s latest price cuts. In addition, Microsoft’s Locally Redundant Disks/Page Blobs Storage is seeing a 28 percent price reduction.

Making good on its Amazon price-matching promise from a year ago, Microsoft plans to cut the price of its Windows Azure cloud storage following a cut by Amazon earlier this week. Microsoft will be dropping prices on its Block Blobs Storage and Disks/Page Blobs Storage effective March 13, according to a January 24 post on the Windows Azure blog. Microsoft plans to make the storage price cuts available worldwide, which, company officials contend, will mean that Azure storage “will be less expensive than AWS in many regions.” Amazon announced price cuts on its Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Simple Storage Service (S3) on January 21.