Amazon once again dropping the price of its new E2 Reserved Instances
Amazon announced Tuesday via its Amazon Web Services blog it is once again dropping the price of its new E2 Reserved Instances running Linux/UNIX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server by up to 27 percent.
This marks the 26th time the company has dropped its EC2 cloud services pricing in its ongoing effort to compete against rival cloud providers like Microsoft and Google.
The price drop comes a few months after Amazon Web Services introduced a more granular billing system to give its customers a better idea of what they are spending on cloud services.
This latest reduction in pricing applies to the Standard (m1), Second-Generation Standard (m3), High-Memory (m2), and High-CPU (c1) instance groups, offering customers greater savings with the more instances they reserve.
More specifically, AWS will automatically provide customers with additional savings when they have more than $250,000 in active upfront Reserved Instance fees.
Customers will receive a savings of up to 65 percent when compared to on-demand instances, says Amazon.
As its cloud platform continues to ramp up in size and scale, Amazon’s margins will gradually decrease over time, allowing the company to pass these savings onto the customers.
The price reduction can be seen by instance family and region in the image above.
The new prices apply to all Reserved Instance models, including Light, Medium, and Heavy Utilization, for any customer purchase made starting March 5, 2013.
Amazon is also offering a promotion throughout March which offers a free trial of AWS Trusted Advisor to generate a personalized report on how users can optimize their bill by benefiting from thelower Reserved Instance prices.
Amazon Web Services recently recruited three of the top cloud computing engineers in Australia in an effort to ramp up its service in the region.
Talk back: Will you be taking advantage of the new, lower Reserved Instance prices? Do you think this latest price reduction will continue to push Amazon Web Services forward as a cloud market leader? Let us know in a comment.
About Justin Lee
Justin Lee has been a staff analyst with theWHIR since 2004. He writes about a range of web hosting and IT-related issues facing the industry on the WHIR website, as well the print version of the WHIR magazine. Follow him on Twitter @Justin_theWHIR.
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Thanks for sharing. I did some more analysis into this price drop. It seems that the High memory instance types are getting a lot of attention. They have been reduced the most and also present the highest savings. My full analysis: http://blog.planforcloud.com/2013/03/aws-reduces-ec2-ris-average-of-11.html
Hassan