Microsoft Cuts Prices on Next-Gen Azure D-Series Virtual Machines

Microsoft makes no bones about why it is cutting prices on its Azure D-series virtual machines: it is going head-to-head with Amazon Web Services.

Nicole Herskowitz, director of product marketing, Cloud Platform, wrote in a blog post:

As part of our promise to deliver the best customer value on Azure, we have had a longstanding commitment to make our prices comparable on commodity services like compute, storage, and bandwidth relative to Amazon Web Services.

Microsoft has cut prices up to 17% on the latest version of its Azure D-series virtual machines, its Dv2 virtual machines, which sport 35% faster CPUs than D "v1" virtual machines and are powered by the newest generation Intel Xeon (Haswell) processors.

Using the company's US East 2 Region, the price reductions are as follows:

• D1-D5 v2
  • 10% decrease on Windows Server instances
  • 14% decrease on Linux instances
• D11-14 v2      
  • 13% decrease on Windows Server instances
  • 17% decrease on Linux instances

The Dv2 price reductions will take effect early February and Microsoft said it will share full details here.

Azure Dv2 instances-unlike AWS EC2 instances-have load balancing and auto-scaling built-in at no additional charge, said Herskowitz in her blog post.

Customers with Enterprise Agreements not only get price reductions, but their price points are even lower-in many cases well below available AWS pricing, she wrote. Unlike AWS, Azure virtual machine usage is billed on a per-minute rate ...