Amazon Web Services (AWS) has dropped the price 10 percent for its M3 instances, designed for media encoding, batch processing, caching, and web serving.

The price drop is effective November 1 and covers all AWS regions. About this time last year, AWS introduced the second-generation instances have up to 50 percent higher absolute CPU performance compared to first-generation instances and are designed for applications such as applications that have high traffic content management systems and apps that are memcached.

According to AWS, there are two second generation Standard instance types, both of which are 64-bit platforms:

• The Extra Large Instance (m3.xlarge) has 15 GB of memory and 13 ECU (EC2 Compute Units) spread across 4 virtual cores, with moderate I/O performance.
• The Double Extra Large Instance (m3.2xlarge) has 30 GB of memory and 26 ECU spread across 8 virtual cores, with high I/O performance.

The introduction last year brought the total instance types to 17, across seven different families.

The price drops are as follows:

News of the price drop comes on the eve of AWS re:Invent, scheduled for next week in Las Vegas. Last year at the event, the company followed the M3 news with dropping the prices of dedicated instances on its EC2 cloud computing platform by up to 80%. Dedicated instances are for single-tenant hardware that is dedicated to a single customer.

More AWS price drops next week? I’d say yes if I were a betting man.

(Feature image via homedit.)