Microsoft has announced price reductions for Dv2 VM instances on Azure, after Amazon recently cut AWS prices for the 51st time since launch.
Amazon regularly reduces the prices across its cloud platform and back in 2013, Microsoft made a commitment "to match Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services such as compute, storage and bandwidth." Now, the company has cut the prices of its second generation D series instances by up to 17 percent following Amazon"s recent price cut which was announced on the 5th of January.
In a blog post announcing the changes, Microsoft"s Director of Product Marketing for the Cloud Platform, Nicole Herskowitz has also outlined the additional benefits available with Azure in comparison with similar AWS offerings. One of the key advantages mentioned in the post is the per-minute billing on Microsoft"s platform compared to AWS" per-hour billing. The company also provides load balancing and auto-scaling on its instances for no extra charges, which Amazon does not.
The new rates will vary across Azure regions, but to give the customers an idea, Microsoft has posted the rates from the US East 2 region that can be seen below:
| VIRTUAL MACHINE TYPE | PRICE REDUCTION (WINDOWS SERVER INSTANCES) | PRICE REDUCTION (LINUX INSTANCES) |
| D1-D5 v2 | 10% | 14% |
| D11-14 v2 | 13% | 17% |
Although, Microsoft is one of the preferred cloud platforms for Windows Server hosting, it still has a long way to go compared to Amazon and Google in overall hosting. But it seems to be taking the right steps to stay relevant in this fast growing market.