Amazon Leads Price War: Drops AWS Pricing Again, Leans Heavy on Reserved Instances

According to Amazon's blog today, the company is now on their 19th price cut since AWS debuted, but who's counting? Well, they are, apparently. The company is lowering pricing on EC2 instances, ElastiCache, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon Elastic Map Reduce are all dropping significantly. Significantly, Amazon is heavily emphasizing its price cuts on Reserved Instances.

The EC2 pricing is dropping by up to 10% for on-demand instances. If you're consuming Reserved Instances, Amazon is dropping prices up to 37%.

Amazon is also appealing to heavy users with its price cuts, offering volume discounts of 10% for customers that own more than $250,000 of Reserved Instances for additional Reserved Instances. After the $2 million mark, Amazon is offering a 20% discount, and Amazon is asking customers to call if they pass the $5 million threshold.

The prices for RDS are dropping by similar amounts. If you're using on-demand RDS, pricing drops by up to 10%. Amazon has shaved pricing as much as 42% for Reserved Instances of RDS. Likewise, ElastiCache is dropping by up to 10% if you use on-demand instances. (ElastiCache doesn't have reserved pricing on its pricing page.)

What's interesting, aside from the actual price drop, is the emphasis Amazon is putting on the Reserved Instances. By moving more customers to Reserved Instances, Amazon can better plan its capacity needs for the next few years and helps lock customers into using AWS. Companies could switch to RackSpace, Google or another provider – but they'd be losing some significant chunks of change in doing so.

This seems like a pretty smart move on Amazon's part, and I'm wondering how long it's going to take for other providers to introduce something similar. As far as I know, Amazon is the only major player offering this kind of pricing scheme and seems to be handily undercutting the other players.

Like This | 0 Comments

View the original article here

Sony Xperia U live photos leak again, still hot looking

We are really starting to worry that at the rate these leaks are going, Sony won't have much news for us at its MWC press conference on Sunday. The Sony Xperia U, which is one of the smartphones to go official there, leaked once again - this time in an extensive live photo session.

The Sony Xperia U was previously known by its codename Kumquat and by its product code - ST25i. It has much of the styling of the high-flying Sony Xperia S, but has a slightly tuned down specs sheet and should come with a lower asking price.

Sony Xperia U live photos

The Xperia U is said to be built around a 3.5" qHD LCD and feature a 1GHz dual-core CPU and 512 MB of RAM. A 5 megapixel camera replaces the 12 megapixel monster we saw on the Xperia S, but the OS at launch should still be Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich should be pushed as an update shortly after, though.

Sony Xperia U live photos

And with the Sony Xperia U mystery all but gone, we start wondering what other cool devices we will see in Barcelona come this Sunday. Just make sure you stick around so you don't miss anything.

Source | Via

View the original article here