Rivals Amazon and Google both announced steep pricing cuts to their cloud storage services today. Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) prices are dropping 24 percent to 28 percent while the price of Google Cloud Storage has been cut more than 30 percent in the past week.

This seems to be a bit of a pricing war: Google already cut prices by 20 percent earlier this week and then followed up with an additional 10 percent cut today to stay under Amazon's new pricing. The lower prices for both services take effect December 1.

Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage can be used by developers in tandem with cloud infrastructure services like Google App Engine and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Both allow users to store data by the hundreds or even thousands of terabytes.

Amazon's new reduced pricing charges 9.5 cents per gigabyte per month for the first terabyte, compared to the previous price of 12.5 cents. After the first terabyte, users pay 8 cents per gigabyte per month, and it keeps going down:

Google Cloud Storage's latest price is 8.5 cents per gigabyte per month for the first terabyte. The new Durable Reduced Availability Storage (DRA) service for infrequently accessed data got a price drop from 7 cents to 6.3 cents per gigabyte per month:

With storage prices dropping and companies like Google and Amazon leveraging economies of massive scale, customer prices are likely to continue moving downward. According to Amazon, this is the 24th time S3 prices have been cut. In addition to the price cut already mentioned, Amazon is also lowering prices for its Reduced Redundancy Storage and Elastic Block Store services.

In related news, Google this week unveiled new high memory and high CPU instances for its Compute Engine service, which is still in a limited preview. Amazon revealed a new data warehouse service called Redshift; a "Data Pipeline" for moving and processing large amounts of data; and a new auto-discovery feature for Amazon ElastiCache, which helps developers build caching layers between applications and databases.