Amazon Web Services cuts relational database prices

Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Tuesday said that it will cut prices for its Relational Database Service for on-demand and reserved instances.

Price cuts are nothing new to AWS, but lower cloud pricing for databases is another data point to highlight a drastically changing market. Aside from a bevy of open source players targeting Oracle, cloud computing can affect hardware demand — especially for database appliances and infrastructure tied to data scaling.

Specifically, AWS said that on-demand Relational Database Service (RDS) prices have been cut as much as 18 percent for MySQL and Oracle bring your own license plans. Prices for SQL Server bring your own license may fall as much as 28 percent. Reserved instance prices will fall as much as 27 percent for MySQL and Oracle bring your own licenses.

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The AWS price cuts highlight yet another trend. Cloud pricing is vicious and AWS will pass along savings as it gains scale. That penchant for price cuts will make life difficult for rivals such as Rackspace and large enterprise vendors such as HP scaling up their cloud services.

Here's a look at the pricing for an m2.xlarge DB Instance for MySQL or Oracle BYOL using a 3-year Reserved Instance.