- Surprise, surprise: Amazon Web Services (AMZN -3.2%) has barely waited 24 hours to respond to Google's huge cloud infrastructure/app platform price cuts. AWS' cuts are the 42nd in its history.
- Prices for popular options for Amazon's EC2 cloud computing service have been lowered by 30% or more, and prices for its S3 storage service have been cut by an average of 51%. Its RDS database service is seeing a 28% cut on average, and its Elasticache caching service a 34% price drop.
- Prior to Amazon's move, cloud analytics firm RightScale pointed out Google's cuts made its computing services much cheaper than Amazon's in many (but not all) cases. RightScale also observed Google is guaranteeing future cuts will be automatically passed on to those making reserved instance commitments, something not the case with Amazon.
- AWS is also: 1) Announcing it has received DoD certification. Amazon already has FedRAMP government clearance, and is building a private cloud for the CIA after fending off an IBM protest. 2) Making its WorkSpaces PC virtualization solution (announced last fall) generally available. 3) Rolling out a new server instance (called R3) that supports up to 244GB of RAM and SSDs.
- Amazon's "Other" North American revenue, dominated by AWS, rose 58% in 2013 to $3.7B. The company joined other Internet stocks in selling off today.