Microsoft Slashes Azure Connectivity Service Rates

Microsoft has yet again lowered Azure pricing for some of the cloud connectivity services. The new cuts affect the more hidden side of cost of cloud computing which isn't talked about nearly as much as storage and compute: the connection and delivery part of the chain.

The new prices are effective immediately. Compute and Storage pricing was recently cut and remains the same.

The price for ExpressRoute, a service that enables private connections, has gone down. For example, ExpressRoute NSP (1Gbps) was dropped from $12,000 a month to $8,700 a month. ExpressRoute is one of the more popular services among data center providers looking to enable customers to securely connect to Azure.

BizTalk saw several price cuts. BizTalk is a cloud integration service that provides Business-to-Business (B2B) enterprise application integration, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) processing and hybrid connections capabilities. Two BizTalk servers and four different BizTalk service levels saw price reductions:

Cache, CDN, and Data Transfer services saw incremental price cuts as well.

In addition to price cuts across "the network-centric" services, prices were dropped for media services encoding, mobile services, multi-factor authentication, SQL server for virtual machines, scheduler, traffic manager and a few more.

Price cutting continues to occur in the cloud. In May, Google reduced the rates of its on-demand virtual server business called Compute Engine by about 32 percent.

Amazon followed almost immediately by announcing its 42nd consecutive rate reduction, IaaS price cuts that ranged from 10 percent to 40 percent, depending on the type of service.

About one week later Microsoft slashed the rates for rentable virtual compute and storage infrastructure on its Azure cloud by up to 35 percent.

The full Azure pricing update list is here.