Microsoft follows up those licensing hikes by snipping away costs for Azure Archive Storage

While Amazon fumed over Microsoft's licensing changes, the gang in Redmond attempted to soften the blow a little by slicing the pricing of Azure Archive Storage.

Azure Archive Storage is aimed at rarely accessed data with what the company calls "flexible latency". Think backups rather than anything particularly too hot. Indeed, Microsoft suggests the cloudy tech would work well as a replacement for the likes of magnetic tapes and regulator-mandated archives.

Encrypted at rest, Azure Archive Storage is one of Microsoft's least expensive storage tiers, costing a few dollars per terabyte per month.

Effective immediately, the company has cut costs by up to half for some of the 29 regions that support the tier.

The move will be welcomed by those who have bought into the Azure cloudy dream, although keep in mind that Microsoft will still want to charge you for actually accessing that data – pulling a terabyte from a blob in an archive in the UK South region will cost you a little more than £15, for example.

However, it will do little to smooth feathers ruffled by the company's decision to shake up its licensing model. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels deployed the bombast after the news broke yesterday.

Vogels claimed that a company that raised prices, cut benefits and restricted freedom of choice was not to be trusted. As a reminder, Amazon hiked Prime prices for its US customers last year, has far fewer developers contributing to open-source projects (compared to Google or Microsoft) and has exercised its own freedom of choice to, er, only pay £1.7m corporation tax on profits of £72.4m.

As it is, of course, absolutely entitled to do.

However, there still remains a certain delight to be had in the company's protestations. As well as the responses of its customers. ®