We’ve lost count of how many times Amazon has reduced or changed the price of its cloud hosting services — but its most recent pricing change could be a sign of something significant.
According to a December 4 Wired article, Amazon billed its new pricing restructure as an effort to simplify the way it charges customers for its cloud computing solutions.
But while the announcement may seem insignificant at a first glance, it actually shows something much more telling about the public cloud solutions industry — that Amazon, long the front-runner in the public cloud industry, is now considering Google’s cloud service as a source of legitimate competition in the game for cloud dominance.
“Google is making a dent and AWS is starting to feel the pain from a pricing perspective,” an ex-Amazon employee who declined to be named told Wired.
Amazon, whose cloud hosting customers include the Central Intelligence Agency and Netflix, according to the New York Times, has changed its pricing system in what seems like a direct reaction to Google’s pricing model, which features no upfront fees for its customers. Amazon’s old model, in contrast, featured upfront prices but then offered discounts to customers that stuck with them.
But while Amazon has cut its upfront fees, it still requires its new customers to agree to use their cloud service for at least a year, Wired reports. And, according to Wired, Google boasts faster infrastructure than Amazon, marking another weakness for Amazon, which currently holds onto about 27% of the world’s market for cloud hosting and infrastructure services.
It’s clear that Amazon is reacting to Google’s increasingly competitive nature in an effort to keep its existing customers and to draw new ones that might otherwise go to Google. But whether or not Amazon’s efforts will ultimately be successful is another thing.
What are your thoughts on Amazon’s recent pricing changes? Do you think Amazon will come out on top, or will Google take over as the leading cloud computing provider? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below. More like this.
