Another week, another round of cloud markdowns. Hot on the heels of Google and Amazon lowering their rates, Microsoft announced double-digit cost reductions of its own in its latest attempt to lap ahead in the fiercely competitive race to zero. Redmond first began matching rivals’ price drops in early 2012, a tradition that was enshrined in the company playbook the following year and continued ever since.

Prices for Azure storage are dropping as much as 35 percent, according to Microsoft cloud platform boss Steve Martin, while compute is becoming up to 65 percent cheaper. The company is also rolling out a new “Basic” virtual machine will cost up to 27 percent less than the regular instances and offer similar capacity and performance, but lacks value-added features, namely balancing and auto-scaling. That’s a worthy trade-off for certain workloads, especially test and development.

Meanwhile, Amazon announced the general availability of WorkSpaces, a desktop-as-a-service solution that was first unveiled at its landmark re:Invent conference last November and competes with VMware’s recently introduced Horizon DaaS. WorkSpaces starts at $35 a month, which will buy you single virtual CPU plus 3.75 gigabytes of memory and 50 gigabytes of storage. For $50, you get Office Professional 2011 and Microsoft Security Tool preloaded. The $60 and $75 “Performance” versions pack an additional processor, 7.5 gigabytes of RAM and 100 gigabytes of raw capacity.

Over at the intersection of cloud and networking, Hewlett-Packard came out with a hosted wireless connectivity management solution that allows admins to provision, monitor and remotely troubleshoot their infrastructure. The service made its debut at this week’s at Interop Las Vegas alongside a pair of SMB-focused access points and two network appliance geared towards midsize companies and enterprises.

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