As competition with Amazon and Google heats up in the cloud market, Microsoft is cutting some Azure service prices to keep up with its competitors. The company made a promise to stay price competitive with its closest rivals, and this movie is fulfilling that promise.
On Thursday, the software giant announced a fresh 17 percent cut in the price of its Azure Dv2 Virtual Machines service. It is the latest version of the platform’s D-series Virtual Machines, so that makes the deal all the sweeter.
That’s not all, the Windows Server instances of the D1-D5 v2 VM will see a 10 percent price reduction while the Linux instances are expected to get a 14 percent reduction.
When it comes down to D11-14 v2 VMs, the Windows Server aspect will drop by 13 percent, the Linux option will slide by a whopping 17 percent, so quite a lot of savings to be had here. Bear in mind that the full price of Dv2 will be shared in February, so keep an eye open for that.
What we have seen as of late, is companies trying to undercut each other in the market. Google did it, Amazon did it, and now Microsoft has done it, and it will only benefit consumers who take advantage of these services.
We have to wonder how long can cloud service providers cut costs before it begins to hit he bottom-line. Eventually, the slashing of prices must stop, and prices will be evened out across the board. The main reason for the broad price cuts at the moment is the fact that cloud service providers do not offer that one thing that sets them apart, and as such, competing at price level is the only forward for now.
