AWS, the popular cloud service by Amazon, is bringing more precision to its pay-as-you-go billing model. Now, you can use EC2 instances and other AWS offerings on a pricing model of a per-second basis. This means now you will have to pay a lesser amount for using the service, especially when you are utilizing it for a short time.
The pay-per-second model will be effective beginning October 2, 2017, and will be applicable to EC2, EBS volumes, Amazon EMR and AWS Batch services. However, the company has made it clear that the Dedicated Per Region Fee, EBS Snapshots, and products in AWS Marketplace are still billed on an hourly basis.
“This change is effective in all AWS Regions and will be effective October 2, for all Linux instances that are newly launched or already running. Per-second billing is not currently applicable to instances running Microsoft Windows or Linux distributions that have a separate hourly charge. There is a 1-minute minimum charge per-instance.
List prices and Spot Market prices are still listed on a per-hour basis, but bills are calculated down to the second, as is Reserved Instance usage (you can launch, use, and terminate multiple instances within an hour and get the Reserved Instance Benefit for all of the instances). Also, bills will show times in the decimal form".
Source: AWS
Well, this is a good news for many of the AWS service utilizers, especially those with short workloads. The company envisions this change as a turning point for developers because now, they will have the opportunity to explore more solutions to computing-bound problems. As the company says,
“One of the many advantages of cloud computing is the elastic nature of provisioning or deprovisioning resources as you need them. By billing usage down to the second we will enable customers to level up their elasticity, save money, and customers will be positioned to take advantage of continuing advances in computing.”