Today Quantum Corp. announced that its virtual deduplication appliance, Q-Cloud, is now available as a cloud-based appliance running on top of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure.
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According to Tariff Consultancy’s (TCL) Pricing the Cloud 2 – 2016 to 2020 report, the decline in pricing reflects in part the intense competition between public cloud computing providers, and also the rapid product innovation that is taking place among the key worldwide platform providers.
If that’s not enough fine print, Microsoft is also encouraging customers to visit the Microsoft Azure website for information about Microsoft licenses on Azure, who can access Azure Compute Options, what workloads are best-suited for ACO, and when license changes go into effect.
Not all its competitors have fared so well over this period, with the survey hinting at a marked drop in use of the Google Cloud platform, with the percentage of people using it falling from 40% in 2013 to 32% 2015. “Definitely, cutting prices down is fantastic for a startup like us”.
Jarrod Levitan, chief cloud officer at TriNimbus, one of the largest AWS partners based in Canada, told CRN that his company was “knocking on [Amazon’s] door harder than anyone else” to encourage the launch of a Canadian region. However, comparing prices among the three can be hard because none of them are exactly the same in what they offer consumers.
“Because you only pay for what you use on the cloud you can also lower the cost of experimentation so you can do more and cut down the time required for complicated business cases”, he says.
Microsoft has long said it would match AWS’s prices for compute, storage and bandwidth.
“In keeping to this commitment, we are announcing price reductions up to 17 percent on the latest version of the popular Azure D-series virtual machines, Dv2 Virtual Machines“. For instance, it mentions the more value gained through Azure as Azure Dv2 instances – unlike AWS EC2 instances – have load balancing and auto-scaling built-in at no additional charge.
The latest round of the cloud price war has seen Microsoft Azure weigh in with its own price cuts and criticism aimed at AWS.
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“While storage remains the number one AWS service purchased (cited by 63% of survey respondents), 37% selected database services and 35% selected application services, and both of these were cited ahead of compute (33%)”, the research note said.
