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AWS Slashes Data Transfer Costs
The cloud price wars continued apace this week, with market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) Inc. slashing data transfer costs significantly.
All inbound data transfers to CloudFront, AWS' content-delivery service, are now free, according to a blog post Thursday by AWS evangelist Jeff Barr.
The cost of outbound data transfers from CloudFront is also reduced between 4 percent and 29 percent, depending on how much data is being transfered and from which AWS edge location (the reductions apply only to edge locations in the United States, Europe, Australia and Japan).
In addition, outbound data transfers from AWS now cost between 5 percent and 43 percent less, again depending on the location of the AWS datacenter and the volume of data being transfered.
The price changes apply to all applicable data transfers starting on Dec. 1, Barr said.
For some time now, AWS has been locked in a "race to the bottom"-style price battle with rivals Microsoft and Google, with each company taking turns slashing cloud services costs to keep pace with the others.
"As I have noted in the past, we focus on driving down our costs over time," Barr said. "As we do this, we pass the savings along to you!"
The constant AWS price cuts have been alluded to by Amazon.com executives as one possible reason for the overall company missing Wall Street expectations in its second quarter 2014 earnings report. However, AWS accounts for only a fraction of Amazon.com's total business and has consistently shown significant growth from quarter to quarter.
The price cuts come on the heels of Tuesday's announcement that AWS was introducing new pricing options for its EC2 Reserved Instances model.