Amazon cuts cloud prices

data storage, processing and computing in the cloud, aiming for more business from application developers and companies, Geek Wire reports.

The reductions range as high as 37% for some services.

It's the 19th time the company has lowered its AWS prices in the past six years. Given Amazon's large presence in the market, these types of moves put pressure on competitors such as Microsoft, Google and smaller companies to further reduce their own prices.

Price reductions vary based on geographic location and the type of service being used, but some of the largest savings are for customers using reserved instances of compute power and storage in the company's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Relational Database Service (RDS) offerings, PC Advisor writes.

A reserved instance is compute power purchased for a set period of time. The alternative to a reserved instance is an on-demand model, in which the servers can be turned on or off and customers pay on an as-needed basis. Prices of reserved instances of EC2 are reducing by 37% in some geographic areas, including the eastern US. On-demand pricing is dropping 10% in that same area. According to AWS' pricing calculator, high-memory on-demand instances start from 90c an hour for Linux/Unix usage and $1.14 per hour for Windows usage.