IBM Cloud to 'uplift' prices by up to 29 percent
All PaaS, including OpenShift, gets a three-point bump. IaaS users outside the US get the nastiest numbers
IBM has announced price rises for its cloud services, effective January 1, 2024.
All users of the Big Blue cloud's platform-as-a-service offerings – including the Kubernetes Service, Red Hat OpenShift, all security services, and all databases – will see their bills rise by at least three percent from that date.
Infrastructure-as-a-service prices are rising, too, thanks to what IBM describes as the necessity "to reflect local costs of delivering services."
That policy means customers of IBM's Accelerated Archive and Deep Archive storage will see their bills swell by 25 percent and 26 percent, respectively.
Users of IBM Cloud's region in São Paulo, Brazil, will be hit with a 29 percent increase – which sounds drastic but may be proportionate, as inflation hit 12 percent in Brazil last year and interest rates are currently 13.75 percent. Further adjustments to reflect the exchange rate from the Brazilian Real to the US Dollar are also planned in January 2024, "to better align with market rates."
Below is the full list of IBM's IaaS price rises coming to users of its bare metal servers, VMs, file and block storage, and networking infrastructure. In São Paulo only, Cloud Object Storage also cops a price rise.
And a quick explanation: the term "uplift" used in the table below is Blue-speak for the difference to the prices it charges in regions around the world, compared to the prices for cloud services delivered from the US.
| Location | Current uplift % | New uplift % | Effective increase % |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dallas, San Jose, Washington DC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Amsterdam, Montreal, Toronto | 3 | 6 | 2.9 |
| London | 7 | 13 | 5.6 |
| Frankfurt, Madrid, Milan, Paris | 10 | 16 | 5.5 |
| Osaka, Singapore, Tokyo | 13 | 20 | 6.3 |
| Chennai, Sydney | 20 | 20 | 0 |
| São Paolo | 20 | 29 | 7.5 |
IBM's cloud division is not alone in hiking prices – the rest of Big Blue has already done it.
The Register has also spotted Salesforce, Microsoft, and Cloudflare revising price tags in recent months. AWS recently introduced a charge for IPv4 addresses.
Analyst firm Liftr Insights found AWS has steadily hiked prices, while Azure costs have fallen. Both hyperscalers have aggressively moved to optimize the cost of using their clouds as customers worry about expanding bills, and waste.
Hyperscale price hikes shouldn't be a surprise – analyst firm Canalys last year predicted cloudy price increases greater than those IBM will introduce. It suggested that some providers will be passing on inflation, but some rises will happen simply because hyperscalers know that it's hard to migrate workloads and customers will probably wear the pain.
IBM Cloud's price changes have been posted to GitHub.
Price uplifts won't change for Power Systems Virtual Server, third-party software, or network bandwidth. ®
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