In addition to the price drop, AWS released a new series of Elastic Cloud Compute instances with high input/output (I/O) qualities. They're optimized, AWS says, for media encoding, batch processing, caching and Web serving. The extra-large instance (m3.xlarge) comes with 15GB of memory and 13 ECU -- which are Amazon compute units -- across four virtual cores. A double extra-large instance has 30GB of memory with 26 ECUs on eight virtual cores. The service debuted in the Northern Virginia US-East region, but AWS plans to roll it out to other regions early next year.

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The new prices are as follows:

" Small instances went from $0.08/hour to $0.065/hour " Medium instances went from $0.16/hour to $0.13/hour " Large instances went from $0.32/hour to $0.26/hour " Extra-large instances went from $0.64/hour to $0.52/hour