A day after Google announced price cuts and enhancements to its cloud computing products, Amazon Web Services responded with price cuts of its own at its AWS Summit in San Francisco. Price cuts for Amazon Web Services are nothing new, and the company took care to note as such by pointing out that the April 1, 2014 price reductions represent the 42nd time the Seattle tech behemoth has slashed prices since its 2006 inception. Amazon EC2 pricing cuts ranged from 10-40% for Linux/Unix virtual machines and 7-35% for Windows-based machines. Similarly, AWS announced deep price cuts on its reserved instances offering on the order of 10-40%. Prices for Amazon S3 were reduced by 51% on average, with a hefty discount of 65% for the 0-1 TB range. Meanwhile, Amazon RDS experienced a price cut of 28% on average. AWS also announced the general availability of Amazon Workspaces, a fully managed desktop as a service offering that allows customers to configure and deliver desktop environments for their employees from a centrally hosted location on the AWS cloud. Amazon Workspaces supports the synchronized, bundled delivery of designated software applications to end users on multiple devices. In addition, AWS elaborated on new functionality in the form of “peering connections” between virtual private clouds (VPC) in the same AWS Region that supports use cases such as separate virtual private clouds for different business units within a large organization. As an example of one such use case, VPC peering connections allow EC2 instances from a VPC for the Finance department to access data in a VPC dedicated to Operations, but not necessarily vice versa, depending on the business rules established by the customer for “peering” or data sharing. Finally, AWS took note of its recent achievement of Department of Defense (DoD) provisional authorization, which certifies it as compliant with DOD security protocols over and beyond those achieved by the FedRAMP certification which AWS has already earned. Overall, today’s announcements from the AWS Summit failed to match the depth and variety of cloud-specific product enhancements revealed by Google, but they confirmed Amazon’s enduring ability to cut prices and innovate as well as its growing credibility amongst U.S. government customers.
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