Microsoft has cut the price of its cloud services product - one month after Amazon did

Microsoft has cut the price of Azure, its cloud services product, after Amazon did a similar thing earlier in January, ZDNet reports.

Amazon cut the price of EC2, a part of Amazon Web Services, and made it easier for a user to only pay for the services they use, based on the time they use them for.

Microsoft has responded and cut the price across its own version of EC2. The price reduction can be by as much as 17%, according to Microsoft, depending on the kind of service used and whether it's based on Linux or Windows.

Microsoft also touted the advantages of Azure over AWS. "It is worthwhile to note that the Azure Dv2 instances - unlike AWS EC2 instances - have load balancing and auto-scaling built-in at no additional charge," the company said.

"In addition to delivering great prices, we provide further discounting and more flexible purchasing programs to support your journey to the cloud," Microsoft continued. The price discounts and flexibility come because Microsof bills for usage on a per-minute basis, not per-hour like Amazon.

Amazon and Microsoft are currently locked into a viscous battle over the massive online software and services industry, which is valued in the hundreds of billions. The two companies recently started to focus on Europe, which is an $11 billion (£7.6 billion) market on its own.