Microsoft Developer

Some time back I had complained that the price of cloud service offerings are not coming down fast enough compared to the drop in hardware price reduction. But then we see the following release from Amazon – AWS.

“…we’ve often told you that one of our goals is to drive down costs continuously and to pass those savings on to you…” (see this)

Indeed, from July 1, they have eliminated the inbound data fee. It used to be US$ 0.10 per GB.

Also they have reduced the outbound data fee between 20% (for lower end of usage) to almost 40% (at the higher end of usage).

Here is the comparison of per GB outbound data fee, before and after 1^st July (for US-Standard, US-West and Europe regions):

However, was this change in price done, as claimed by Amazon, to pass the cost reduction benefit to customer? Probably not because few days before this announcement Microsoft had announced that inbound data transfer will be free from July 1, 2011 (see this).

BI in the Cloud Becomes Attractive
This change may one up interesting possibilities for doing DW & BI application on the cloud. Earlier, the biggest roadblock for moving such application to cloud was the prohibitive cost of transferring data into the cloud. With the removal of that stumbling block the economics of BI in the cloud looks more attractive.