Amazon Announces Two New M3 Instance Types and Price Reductions In S3 and EBS
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To make itself competitive, Amazon Web Services announced two new sizes for EC2 M3 instance and cut rates for two existing cloud products. The new sizes for EC2 M3 instances are M3.medium and M3.large. On the other hand, Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS will now be offered at reduced prices.
Amazon has agreeably been the largest cloud service provider till date with highest number of customers and users. However, in the recent few months, major competitors like IBM, Microsoft, Verizon, and Google are trying harder to get closer to this market leader. That is why, Amazon Web Services has pushed on to sustain its foremost position in the global cloud industry.
The introduction of two new types in EC2 M3 instance could be regarded as a part of portfolio expansion. M3.medium will be offered with 1 and 3 virtual CPU and EC2 Compute Units, respectively. The memory specification of M3.medium is 3.75 GB, while the instance storage offers 1 x 6 SSD*6 GB instance storage. M3.large on the other side has 2 virtual CPUs and 6 ECUs. The memory and instance storages of this type are 7.5 GB and 1 x 32 SSD*6 GB, respectively. Both the types feature Intel Xeon E5-2670 Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge physical processor with moderate network performance. However, both the general purpose types are not available as EBS optimized.
M3 instance generation has higher compute performance than the M1 instance family. Similar to the M3 generation, the prices of new types are kept low, while it can be launched as Spot, On-Demand or Reserved instance, in any of the AWS regions.
In the same blog post, Amazon also announced the price concessions for its existing and new customers on Amazon S3 storage prices. The new prices fall with a ratio up to 22 percent across all regions. Among the three storage types of Amazon S3, Standard Storage and Reduced Redundancy Storage (RSS) will experience the drop prices, while those of Glacier Storage remain the same. The new price for first 1 TB/month starts from $0.085 per GB and $0.068 per GB for Standard Storage and RSS, respectively.
The second product to undergo the price reduction is Amazon EBS. The new price under Standard volumes starts from $0.05 per GB for provisioned storage and $0.05 per 1 million I/O requests. In case of Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes, the starting price for per GB-month of provisioned storage will be $0.125, while that for per provisioned IOPS-month will be $0.10.
DigitalOcean has just announced that to pass one million cloud servers. It has also claimed that its growth rate has overtaken that of Amazon Web Services. The news would definitely have concerned the personnel at AWS. These new decisions will leverage Amazon in gaining back the torque and contend with the fast moving competitors.
2014 is been predicted as the ideal year for cloud development, innovation, and adoption. Seeing this, each cloud service provider is researching extensively to come up with something new and competitive.
