AWS Price-Cuts: EC2 Price Reduction for C4, M4, and R3 Instances

Cloud infrastructure giant Amazon Web Services announced yet another round of price cuts for a few of its virtual machine instances, as consumers happily wait to see how thing cloud IaaS margins can get.

VMs affected by the price cuts are Amazon’s R3, C4, and M4  instances for its EC2 Cloud IaaS.

M4 general purpose instances are the newest instance type for its EC2 cloud computing service and offer a balance of compute, memory and network resources well-suited for a variety of purposes, available in five sizes with up to 40 vCPUs and 160 GiB of system memory.

Price cuts should come as no surprise to those closely following the cloud IaaS market, AWS and its co-belligerents, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and to a lesser extent IBM, have been fighting a prolonged price war over cloud IaaS for several years. The continued lowering of cloud computing prices have pushed some tech pundits to speculate whether the tech giants are making any money on cloud services, but, if recent figures disclosed by Amazon are any indication, cloud profits are stronger than ever, and there could be room for further shrinking of margins as competitors strive to challenge AWS for the top spot.

Here’s the breakdown of the price changes, via a blog post from AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr:

• C4 and M4 instances running Linux will see On-Demand, Reserved instance, and Dedicated host prices dropped by 5% in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions.
• R3 instances running Linux will see On-Demand, Reserved instance and Dedicated host prices dropped by 5% in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and South America (Brazil) regions.
• On-Demand and Reserved instance prices for R3 instances running Linux will be reduced by 5% in the AWS GovCloud (US)regions.
• Smaller reductions apply to the same instance types that run Windows, SLES, and RHEL in the regions mentioned.

Changes to the On-Demand and Dedicated host pricing are retroactive to the beginning of the month (January 1, 2016); the new Reserved instance pricing went into effect yesterday.

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