As expected, price cuts had been much less drastic for Amazon and Microsoft in CY15 ? with both vendors choosing to reduce
prices on specific instances compared to across the board cuts in CY14 (compute reduced 35-40%). Conversely, Google continued to
reduce compute pricing across the board by 5-30% in CY15. Typically, Google initiates the wave of price cuts (March 2014,
October/November 2014, May/June 2015). However, early in 2016 we have already seen Amazon and Microsoft cut pricing for
specific compute instances, while Google did not.
Google did, however, write a blog post on January 8 stating they are still 15-41% cheaper than AWS compute post AWS?s
reductions on 1/5. Google has committed to follow Moore?s Law, passing on savings to customers (20-30% annual decreases in
hardware costs). Therefore another 20-30% across the board price cut from Google in CY16 would not be surprising. This could be
announced as early as their GCP Next Conference in San Francisco on March 23-24. And similar to behavior in CY15, we do not
expect Amazon and Microsoft to follow suit.
