Windows Azure got into the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) business Tuesday when a hungry Microsoft took on Amazon Web Services, vowing to match its pricing on “commodity services” such as compute, storage and bandwidth despite Amazon’s habitual price cutting.
To start, Microsoft will cut prices on its IaaS and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) virtual machines by 21%-33%.
Microsoft also said that, “Regardless of how you choose to buy Windows Azure, you’ll get the benefit of this price reduction.”
For a six- or 12-month spending commitment Microsoft will discount the standard pay-as-you-go rates. The discount applies to any Azure resource the user buys so he can tinker with deployment sizes.