AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

Paying for computing resources will become even more precise next month, when Amazon will introduce per-second billing for EC2 instances.

Effective October 2 in all AWS regions, Linux instances launched in On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot form will be billed in one-second increments, Amazon Web Services announced. Per-second billing also applies to provisioned storage for EBS volumes, as well as Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) and AWS Batch.

Google and Microsoft, by comparison, offer billing by the minute.

"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," Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS, wrote in a blog post.

In addition to reducing the cost of many workloads, Barr said the new pricing could inspire customers "to innovate and to think about your compute-bound problems in new ways."

The new billing applies to all Linux instances that are newly launched or already running, and thhere is a one-minute minimum charge per instance.