Yesterday, Amazon announced that it would be cutting the prices of both its S3 and EBS cloud-based storage. Today, Microsoft announced that it too was cutting the cost of its cloud storage. The software giant promised last April that it would match Amazon's prices for commodity cloud services: storage, bandwidth, and computation.

Amazon's pricing varies from region to region, and the price cuts range from 6 percent if you're storing between 1 and 50 terabytes of data, to up to 22 percent—though you'll need to be storing at least 5 petabytes to take advantage of this.

Microsoft says that not only is it going to match these prices, making cuts of up to 20 percent itself, but it will also charge the same amount in every region. This means that Azure storage will in some parts of the world as much as 10 percent cheaper than the Amazon equivalent.

Related costs will also be cut. Microsoft currently charges $0.01 per 100,000 storage transactions. Amazon's new price will be $0.05 per 1,000,000; Microsoft is duly halving its per-transaction cost to match.

Amazon will be ahead in one area: its price changes take effect from February 1. Microsoft's won't kick in until March 13.