Pay by the hour for cloud computing? That’s so last decade. Amazon Web Services today announced a new pricing structure that lets users pay by the second for Linux instances on its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Elastic Block Store (EBS) services.
The move throws a new twist into the cloud pricing wars between AWS and rivals including Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, both of which offer options to pay by the minute.
“Some of our more sophisticated customers have built systems to get the most value from EC2 by strategically choosing the most advantageous target instances when managing their gaming, ad tech, or 3D rendering fleets,” explained Jeff Barr, AWS chief evangelist, in a post announcing the news. “Per-second billing obviates the need for this extra layer of instance management, and brings the costs savings to all customers and all workloads.”
The company notes that Dedicated Per Region Fee, EBS Snapshots, and AWS Marketplace products are still subject to hourly billing.
