The industry’s top cloud providers regularly cut their infrastructure rates in a bid to stay ahead of the competition. Last week, Google set the pace by announcing a massive 33 percent reduction in the price its so-called Preemptive VMs, which are geared towards low-priority workloads that don’t need to run continuously for an extended period of time.

What makes the instances better-suited for the task than the search giant’s regular cloud machines is the fact that they’re provisioned on unused gear in its data centers. Google reserves the right to reclaim the hardware whenever the need presents itself and in exchange makes Preemptive VMs available at a small fraction of the price of other machines. This week’s mark-down makes the series even cheaper, which the Alphabet Inc. subsidiary hopes will make its platform more competitive against market leader AWS.

Google timed the update to go out shortly before the start of AWS Summit in New York, where Amazon Inc. announced a plethora of changes for its rivaling cloud. Among them were a major price reduction of its own, new administrative functionality and an API management feature that allows companies to regulate how developers access their AWS-hosted services. The addition makes it possible to throttle the number of requests that a third party can make to a workload in a given time period, create fixed usage quotas and download activity data in a JSON files.

Amazon sees the functionality finding use mainly among software-as-a-service providers with API-based offerings like FullContact Inc., which sells an organization tool that helps workers manage their address books. The startup raised $25 million in funding last week from a group of investors led by Foundry Group to finance the development of new features for the platform. It’s also planning to step marketing efforts in a bid to grow its user base.

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