Amazon-Google cloud price war heats up

The cloud pricing wars are heating up, and today it's Google -- again -- putting on the pressure.

The search giant, which has been growing its rentable cloud offerings, today said in a blog post that it's lowering cloud pricing by an additional 10 percent on top of the over 20 percent cut it unveiled earlier this week. In case math is a little tough for any of you, that brings the total price reduction to over 30 percent. Not too shabby.

What could have motivated the additional cut today? Could a 24 percent to 27 percent price cut announced yesterday by a big rival have anything to do with it?

Amazon's Web Services business yesterday said it would cut S3 prices by about a quarter across all regions. As CNET noted yesterday, that move illustrated the cloud provider's ability to add economies of scale to its IT infrastructure. It also highlighted how AWS intends to disrupt "old-guard technology companies."

Google, meanwhile, said in its post today that it's "committed to delivering the best value in the marketplace to businesses and developers looking to operate in the cloud."

Amazon, Google, and many other tech companies have been duking it out over cloud computing. Such technology allows users to quickly add capacity when they need it and lower it when they don't. Since users don't have to buy their own servers and other hardware, it's typically viewed as a way for businesses to save money.

For Amazon, Google, and others, it's a big opportunity to generate some cash. And demand for cloud computing is largely expected to continue growing.

Cloud isn't the only area Google and Amazon have been fighting. They're also dueling to offer low-priced, popular tablets, among other services.