It is always fun to write about price reductions. I enjoy knowing that our customers will find AWS to be an even better value over time as we work on their behalf to make AWS more and more cost-effective over time. If you’ve been reading this blog for an extended period of time you know that we reduce prices on our services from time to time, and todays announcement serves as the 42nd price reduction since 2008.

We’re more than happy to continue this tradition with our latest price reduction.

Effective April 1, 2014 we are reducing prices for Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, the Amazon Relational Database Service, and Elastic MapReduce.

Amazon EC2 Price Reductions

We are reducing prices for On-Demand instance as shown below. Note that these changes will automatically be applied to your AWS bill with no additional action required on your part.

Instance Type Linux / Unix Price Reduction

Microsoft Windows Price Reduction

M1, M2, C1 10-40% 7-35% C3 30% 19% M3 38% 24-27%

We are reducing the prices for Reserved Instances as well for all new purchases. With todays announcement, you can save up to 45% with on a 1 year RI and 60% on a 3 year RI relative to the On-Demand price. Here are the details:

Instance Type Linux / Unix Price Reduction

Microsoft Windows Price Reduction

1 Year

3 Year

1 Year

3 Year

M1, M2, C1 10%-40% 10%-40% Up to 23% Up to 20% C3 30% 30% Up to 16% Up to 13% M3 30% 30% Up to 18% Up to 15%

Also keep in mind that as you scale your footprint of EC2 Reserved Instances, that you will benefit from the Reserved Instance volume discount tiers, increasing your overall discount over On-Demand by up to 68%.

Consult the EC2 Price Reduction page for more information.

Amazon S3 Price Reductions

We are reducing prices for Standard and Reduced Redundancy Storage, by an average of 51%. The price reductions in the individual S3 pricing tiers range from 36% to 65%, as follows:

Tier New S3 Price / GB / Month

Price Reduction

0-1 TB $0.0300 65% 1-50 TB $0.0295 61% 50-500 TB $0.0290 52% 500-1000 TB $0.0285 48% 1000-5000 TB $0.0280 45% 5000 TB or More $0.0275 36%

These prices are for the US Standard Region; consult the S3 Price Reduction page for more information on pricing in the other AWS Regions.

Amazon RDS Price Reductions

We are reducing prices for Amazon RDS DB Instances by an average of 28%. There’s more information on the RDS Price Reduction page, including pricing for Reserved Instances and Multi-AZ deployments of Amazon RDS.

Amazon ElastiCache Price Reductions

We are reducing prices for Amazon ElasticCache cache nodes by an average of 34%. Check out the ElastiCache Price Reduction page for more information.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce Price Reductions

We are reducing prices for Elastic MapReduce by 27% to 61%. Note that this is addition to the EC2 price reductions described above. Here are the details:

Instance Type EMR Price Before Change

New EMR Price

Reduction

m1.small $0.015 $0.011 27% m1.medium $0.03 $0.022 27% m1.large $0.06 $0.044 27% m1.xlarge $0.12 $0.088 27% cc2.8xlarge $0.50 $0.270 46% cg1.4xlarge $0.42 $0.270 36% m2.xlarge $0.09 $0.062 32% m2.2xlarge $0.21 $0.123 41% m2.4xlarge $0.42 $0.246 41% hs1.8xlarge $0.69 $0.270 61% hi1.4xlarge $0.47 $0.270 43%

With this price reduction, you can now run a large Hadoop cluster using the hs1.8xlarge instance for less than $1000 per Terabyte per year (this includes both the EC2 and the Elastic MapReduce costs).

Consult the Elastic MapReduce Price Reduction page for more information.

We’ve often talked about the benefits that AWS’s scale and focus creates for our customers. Our ability to lower prices again now is an example of this principle at work.

It might be useful for you to remember that an added advantage of using AWS services such as Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 over using your own on-premises solution is that with AWS, the price reductions that we regularly roll out apply not only to any new storage that you might add but also to the existing data that you have already stored in AWS. With no action on your part, your cost to store existing data goes down over time.

Once again, all of these price reductions go in to effect on April 1, 2014 and will be applied automatically.

— Jeff;