AWS Slashes Prices For EC2 Instances

The cloud service provider said it was cutting the prices of its On-Demand Amazon EC2 instances running Linux, starting Friday.

The reductions apply to the instances of CPU and memory offered in the AWS M1 (First Generation Standard), M2 (High Memory), M3 (Second Generation Standard), and C1 (High-CPU) families.

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"We continue to work to make AWS more powerful and less expensive, and to pass the savings on to you," Jeff Barr, the chief evangelist for AWS, wrote on a company blog Friday.

The size of the reductions varies. For example, for the MI standard in the U.S. West Region in Northern California, the reductions offer 27.7-percent savings, while in the U.S. East Region in Northern Virginia, prices dropped by 7.7 percent.

For C1 standard, prices in the U.S. West Region in Northern California dropped by 11.3 percent, and for the U.S. East Region in Northern Virginia, they dropped by 12.1 percent.

The company also said it is lowering the cost of transferring data from one AWS Region to another. The savings range from 26 percent in the Asia Pacific Region to 83 percent in the Oregon and Northern California Regions in the U.S. West Regions and the Northern Virginia region in the U.S. East.

In addition, AWS said it has now expanded availability of its Second Generation (M3) instances on EC2. M3, which offers up to 50 percent higher CPU performance than other families of instances. It previously was available only in the Northern Virginia region.

Now, customers can use M3 instances in the Oregon, Northern California, Ireland, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney and GovCloud (U.S.) regions, with a scheduled roll out planned within weeks for Sao Palo, Brazil, Barr said.

PUBLISHED FEB. 1, 2013