Microsoft has been dragged into a cloud price war, slashing the cost of Azure to match last week’s price cuts on Amazon Web Services. Ahead of the Build developer conference, the company said it would match or beat any price from Amazon for both process computing and storage, heavily discounting its services in the process. Although focussing on price, Microsoft also announced lower-grade options for redundancy of data.
Microsoft slashed prices on several of its cloud computing services, it announced on Monday, following through on a standing promise to match Amazon Web Services, which made similar cuts last week. The software giant made the announcement in a blog post by Windows Azure general manager Steven Martin saying it will slash prices on various services by 27 to 65 percent. “We recognize that economics are a primary driver for some customers adopting cloud, and stand by our commitment to match prices and be best-in-class on price performance,” Martin wrote. The move coincided with Microsoft’s Build conference taking place this week in San Francisco.