Microsoft may not have made too much noise in this regard, but by most estimates Windows Azure is now the number one contender for the title of the cloud king. AWS still remains a giant, but Amazon surely is wary and watchful of Redmond’s cloud ambitions.
This war for public cloud supremacy means the top two (or three if you include Google) regularly trade blows when it comes to adding new features and price cuts.
The release of Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft’s server operating system has also brought around up to 22 percent off the cost of memory intensive compute instances on Windows Azure. This offer spans the Windows, Linux and Cloud Services offerings:
“Memory-intensive instances are great for running applications such as SharePoint, SQL Server, 3rd party databases, in-memory analytics and other enterprise applications. As the usage trend for adopting memory-intensive instances continues to grow, we are pleased to be able to meet customer demand with additional cost savings.”
This price reduction goes into effect at the end of November, by the way.
It does, however, make the Windows Azure platform even more flexible to businesses and enterprises that host their own infrastructure. More importantly, it reflects Redmond’s efforts to offer a cloud operating system that runs both on Azure and a company’s internal data center.
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Good. I’m all for MS doing 20-30% cuts across the board.