Last week, amidst the din of VMWorld and people up in arms that OpenStack is implementing Rackspace’s APIs, Amazon’s Web Services Blog announced a significant price reduction on High-Memory Double Extra Large and High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large instances.

This reduction is indicative of Amazon’s efforts to drive down cost (and likely to level their work loads). We went through the AWS blog and pulled out all all the announcements that reduced costs for AWS users.

AWS Price Announcments

AWS has made changes that reduced prices on some part of the service 10 times in the last 18 months:

  • Reserve Instances

  • Lowered Reserve Instance Pricing

  • Lowered EC2 Pricing

  • Lowered S3 and EU Windows Pricing

  • Spot Instances

  • Lowered Data Transfer Pricing

  • Combined Bandwidth Pricing

  • Lowered CloudFront Pricing

  • Free Tier and Increased SQS Limits

  • Lowered High Memory Instance Pricing

We have outlined Amazon’s rate of innovation in the past. The pattern of these price reductions highlights Amazon’s commitment to not just innovate, but to also lower costs and pass that savings to their customers.

Amazon’s core competency is delivering goods at high volume for low margins. AWS was born from 2 decades of experience operating a massive web infrastructure and relentlessly driving down costs in the datacenter, with better processes and automation on commodity hardware and open source software.

Amazon is not resting on their proverbial cloud laurels, and will make sure no one else can either.