Azure Strikes Back with Their Own Storage Discounts

The storage price wars continue. Last week, Amazon Web Services announced lower prices for S3 and EBS storage. A couple days later, Azure announced they would match the pricing.

We are committed to matching Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services like compute, storage, and bandwidth. Effective March 13, we are reducing prices by up to 20 percent for Block Blobs Storage, up to 28 percent for Locally Redundant Disks/Page Blobs Storage, and, we are also lowering the price of Storage transactions by 50 percent.

Azure is rapidly gaining ground to Amazon. According to a recent Nasuni 2013 Cloud Storage Report, “This year, our tests revealed that Microsoft Azure Blob Storage has taken a significant step ahead of last year’s leader, Amazon S3, to take the top spot across three primary tests (performance, scalability and stability), Microsoft emerged as a top performer in every category.”

Whatever flavor you prefer — AWS or Azure — you’re able to use your favorite Bitnami images. Bitnami is the largest single provider of images on both platforms with over 80 open source apps and development stacks to choose from. To launch a Bitnami image from Azure, visit the Azure VM Depot.

Your Amazon Storage Costs May Have Dropped 50%

Amazon announced today that prices for their S3 standard and Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) have dropped at every tier by up to 22% in some regions, and EBS pricing has dropped by a whopping 50%. The price drop puts added pressure on competitors who are trying to keep up with Amazon's low-margin business strategy. 

Where Amazon S3 provides unlimited storage, EBS (or Elastic Block Store) provides high performance compute power with ease of scalability. New S3 pricing can save companies a bundle on their cloud storage costs. For example at the 49TB/month tier standard storage costs change in each region:

	EU (Ireland)	US East (N. Virginia)	US West (N. California)
49 TB / month	Before: $0.080 / GB After: $0.075 / GB	Before: $.080 / GB After: $0.075 / GB	Before: $0.090 / GB After: $0.084 / GB

But perhaps the bigger news is EBS price reduction. On EBS Standard volumes, prices have dropped from $0.11 per GB-month of provisioned storage to $.055 per GB-month. The price reductions are big shots fired over the bows of other public cloud service providers and begs the question, "why wait to move to the cloud?"

New instance types on BCH

Amazon had two announcements today: two new sizes for M3 instances and huge price drops for S3 and EBS. For EC2 customers, the new instance types – m3.medium and m3.large with 1 and 2 vCPUs respectively – give you greater control over your cloud costs and server capabilities. For example, the M-instance types are ideal for small and mid-size databases and data processing. Amazon also offers C-instance types which are intended for high computer-power applications.

The even better news: we've already added the new instance types to our server management options for Bitnami Cloud Hosting. For the uninitiated, Bitnami Cloud Hosting is an application to help you manage application images in the Amazon cloud. It offers convenient features such as automated backups, ease of scaling up or down, and user-friendly controls for managing your storage. Within Bitnami Cloud Hosting you can launch any of our 80+ images or configure a server with different components or databases.