The Big Three public cloud vendors have been cutting prices on their computing services for years, but new research finds that compute pricing is stabilizing as storage and databases become the new hotspots for price wars.
451 Research released new data (PDF) on cloud pricing Thursday that suggests object storage pricing is down 14 percent over the last year, compared to a drop of just five percent for virtual machine pricing. The firm credited IBM Softlayer for kicking off this new price competition back in the third quarter of last year, when it cut prices on storage and Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google all scrambled to match.
As always, this is great news for cloud buyers, and 451 Research suggested there’s even more room for price cuts on both storage and compute, depending on what kind of margins the cloud players are willing to tolerate. Look for relational database pricing to fall over the course of this year as well as more and more companies migrate old data to the cloud and cloud vendors step up their competitive efforts against legacy database companies like Oracle and SAP.