Amazon Web Services Inc. today made what it says is one of the largest price reductions in its history, cutting the cost of its Amazon Elastic File System service by as much as 92% for some customers.

Under the new pricing plan, customers can store and access files natively in a file system for just 8 cents per gigabyte, per month.

Amazon EFS is the company’s fully managed and cloud-native NFS file system for Linux workloads. The service offers what’s called “elastic storage,” because customers’ file systems grow and shrink automatically as more files are added or deleted.

“As storage grows, the likelihood that a given application needs access to all of the files all of the time lessens, and access patterns can also change over time,” AWS senior technical evangelist Steve Roberts wrote in a blog post announcing the price cuts. “Two common drivers for moving applications to the cloud are to maximize operational efficiency and to reduce the total cost of ownership, and this applies equally to storage costs.”

To help with this, Amazon is cutting the costs associated with its Lifecycle Management service for EFS, which provides an additional storage tier for infrequently access files. When enabled on a file system, Lifecycle Management will select files that aren’t accessed frequently enough according to a user’s lifecycle policy, and move these to the more cost-efficient EFS Infrequently Accessed storage class. That means customers can reduce costs by avoiding storing all of their data on better-performing but more expensive storage systems.

Amazon said infrequently accessed data held in the EFS IA storage class would still be immediately accessible, the only tradeoff being slightly higher operation latency.

The EFS IA storage class was first launched in February, priced at 4.5 cents per GB per month, and is now being reduced to just 2.5 cents per GB, per month, Amazon said.

Lifecycle Management is available now in all Amazon regions where Elastic File System is present.

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