Microsoft has made its foray into the cloud service provider price war by announcing it is cutting the price of its storage services by up to 65%.
The price changes, which will take effect after May 1, were revealed in a Microsoft blog post today written by Steve Martin, general manager of Micorosoft Azure, and come ahead of the company’s Build event taking place in San Francisco this week.
Martin wrote that Microsoft was cutting the price on compute by up to 35% and storage by up to 65%, as it looked to react to similar recent price cuts by Google and Amazon.
"We recognise that economics are a primary driver for some customers adopting cloud, and stand by our commitment to match prices and be best-in-class on price performance," Martin said.
"Simply put, it means devoting the bulk of our efforts to delivering innovation and a quality experience for our customers, developers, and partners."
Microsoft is also lowering the price of memory-intensive Linux instances by 35% and Windows instances by 27%. Block Blob storage prices are also going down: up to 65% for LRS and 44% for GRS.
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The company also announced a new ‘Basic’ tier of General Purpose instances, available on April 3, which offers similar services to its existing ‘Standard’ tier but will cost 27% less. There will also be a new ‘Basic’ tier for memory-intensive instances that Microsoft says will be available "in the coming months."
Lastly, the company revealed new lower-grade options for redundancy of data called Zone Redundant Storage, which offers a cheaper option than the current Geo Redundant Storage system, and can keep three copies of data in two locations several hundreds of miles apart.
Amazon slashed the price of its Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform last week, a day after Google announced a similar move as it looks to attract new customers by keeping the cost of cloud computing down.
Microsoft’s Azure service has grown steadily over the last few years, spurred on by the leadership of now-CEO Satya Nadella, who helped create and then lead the division, which is now one of the company’s most successful.
