It’s a pattern that has become familiar: Amazon Web Services (AWS) cuts pricing on a specific service, but customers using the Sydney data centre don’t get the same degree of discounting as in other locations. But Amazon’s latest round of price cuts — for the S3 and EBS storage services — don’t work out too badly.
Picture: David McNew/Getty
Price cuts for S3 and EBS kick in from 1 February. As the table below shows, while S3 prices remain lower for US East (typically Amazon’s cheapest region) than in Sydney, we’ve seen similar or better percentage discounts. (All prices are in US dollars, and are per GB per month.)
| Product | Region | Old price | New price | Reduction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard 0-1TB | US East | $0.095 | $0.085 | 11% |
| S3 Standard 0-1TB | Sydney | $0.105 | $0.094 | 10% |
| S3 Standard 1-50TB | US East | $0.080 | $0.075 | 6% |
| S3 Standard 1-50TB | Sydney | $0.090 | $0.084 | 7% |
| S3 Standard 50-500TB | US East | $0.070 | $0.060 | 14% |
| S3 Standard 50-500TB | Sydney | $0.075 | $0.064 | 15% |
| S3 Standard 500-1000TB | US East | $0.065 | $0.055 | 15% |
| S3 Standard 500-1000TB | Sydney | $0.070 | $0.059 | 16% |
| S3 Standard 1000-5000TB | US East | $0.060 | $0.051 | 15% |
| S3 Standard 1000-5000TB | Sydney | $0.065 | $0.055 | 15% |
| S3 Standard 5000TB+ | US East | $0.055 | $0.043 | 22% |
| S3 Standard 5000TB+ | Sydney | $0.060 | $0.047 | 22% |
| EBS Provisioned Storage | US East | $0.100 | $0.050 | 50% |
| EBS Provisioned Storage | Sydney | $0.110 | $0.080 | 27% |
The EBS discount isn’t so impressive. Given data transfer, electricity and other operational costs, we can’t imagine the higher overall Sydney price scenario changing in the near future.
Amazon has also expanded its range of M3 high-performance instances; hit the blog post for more details on those.
AWS Update – New M3 Sizes & Features + Reduced EBS Prices + Reduced S3 Prices [AWS Blog]
Comments
2 responses to “Some Amazon S3 and EBS Price Cuts Are Actually Better For Australia”
You may want to change the term “EBS Provisioned Storage”, as it’s a bit misleading. The prices quoted are the new per-GiB prices for EBS Standard Volumes. The per-GiB price for EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes has not changed.
Is this a cloud thing?