Just weeks after Microsoft Azure chief Scott Guthrie declared that cloud pricing wars with Amazon Web Services were winding down, Microsoft’s cloud service has cut prices on several of its virtual machines, effective Oct. 1.
General-purpose Dv2 VMs, which offer a CPU that Microsoft says is about 35 percent faster than that found in the basic D series, are now 15 percent less expensive. The basic A1 and A2 VMs — members of the A series, which can be deployed on a variety of hardware types and processors — are now up to 50 percent cheaper.
The F series, which offer the same CPU performance as the Dv2’s but at a lower per-hour list price, cost up to 11 percent less. And starting next month, a new A series, the Av2, will debut, with prices up to 36 percent lower than the A series standard VMs.
The price cuts come as “part of our continued commitment to deliver Azure to customers at the best possible price,” said Takeshi Numoto, corporate VP of cloud and enterprise, in a blog post. In mid-September, Guthrie said Azure and AWS “aren’t competing on price.”
AWS, which calls its virtual machines Elastic Cloud Compute instances, is currently offering 750 hours per month of micro-instance use at no charge. But Azure, too, offers a free trial.
