Andy Jassy
Andy Jassy

SAN FRANCISCO – When it comes to the cloud, the name of the game is price cuts. Amazon Web Services head Andy Jassy took the stage at today’s AWS Summit in San Francisco to talk about the company’s plan for its popular cloud service platform, and he clearly wanted to emphasize how cost-effective it is.

After extolling the virtues of the company’s subscription-based reserved instances, Jassy said that AWS prices will be coming down for the 42nd time since 2006. The price changes, which take effect on April 1, include a 51 percent average price reduction for AWS’s Simple Storage Service, and a 38 percent average price reduction for general-purpose M3 Elastic Compute Cloud instances.

The reductions come after Google announced a number of price reductions to its Cloud Platform yesterday, targeted at making on-demand instances less costly. While Amazon’s reductions will affect on-demand and reserved customers, the tone of the remarks today clearly show that Amazon thinks the best way to give users price reductions is to get them signed on to multi-year contracts.

Amazon’s pricing changes also mean that Microsoft Azure is going to be changing its prices soon. Last April, Microsoft said that Azure pricing will match Amazon’s offerings, and has kept up with its commitment so far.

In addition, Jassy said that the company plans to refresh its storage-optimized instances, and announced that Amazon will launch a new memory-optimized instance known as R3, which will feature an 8 to 1 memory to CPU ratio, with up to 244 GB of RAM.

There’s more to come from AWS this year, too. Jassy said that the company had already announced 80 new features and services this year, outpacing its feature growth in the same period during 2013.

“The pace of innovation at AWS is accelerating,” he said.

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