AWS kicks off year with 51st price cut

Some instances of its EC2 range cut by five per cent

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced its 51st price cut to date, trimming the cost of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) by five per cent in some instances.

AWS' chief evangelist Jeff Barr unveiled the reductions on a blog today.

EC2 is a web service which AWS claims provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale cloud computing easier for developers.

"We are reducing the On-Demand and Reserved instance, and Dedicated host prices for C4 and M4 instances running Linux, by five per cent," Barr said, adding that the savings will be for customers based in its regions in Northern Virginia, Northern California, Oregon, Ireland, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Singapore and Sydney.

"We are also reducing the On-Demand, Reserved instance, and Dedicated host prices for R3 instances running Linux by five per cent [in the same regions]," he added. "Finally, we are reducing the On-Demand and Reserved instance prices for R3 instances running Linux by five per cent in the AWS GovCloud US regions."

Barr said the move marks its 51st price reduction yet. AWS's technical evangelist Ian Massingham explained the importance of the company's price reductions when speaking to CRN last month, claiming the firm's business model and scale allows it to do so.