A price war for cloud services has broken out between the major players Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
Google started the war last week by announcing that it was dropping the price of its cloud storage by more than 68 per cent.
Amazon followed suit with its own cuts which range from 10 to 68 per cent and this morning Microsoft followed suit by matching AWS' lowest prices (US East Region) for S3 and EBS, and reducing prices by up to 20 per cent and making the lower prices available in all regions worldwide.
For Microsoft's "Locally Redundant Disks/Page Blobs Storage," the company is reducing prices by up to 28 per cent. It is also reducing the price of Azure Storage service by half.
Prices always falling
The cost of cloud services has been dropping steadily since AWS introduced the service eight years ago. This is the 42nd price cut during that time.
The new pricing sees the S3 object-storage service drop by 51 per cent, while the raw computing services on EC2 fall by as much as 40 per cent. Amazon's new prices take effect February 1.
Amazon, which pioneered public cloud computing in 2006, is still the undisputed King. Its fast-growing AWS business helped transform the company from traditional online retailing into a tech industry giant.
Earlier this week, Cisco announced plans to spend $1 billion over the next two years to build a new cloud services business, and Microsoft rebranded its Azure service.
