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Amazon Starts Charging For Cloud Computing Resources By the Second (amazon.com)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the head-in-the-cloud dept.

AmiMoJo writes: "Back in the old days, you needed to buy or lease a server if you needed access to compute power," remembers Amazon's AWS blog. "When Amazon launched EC2 back in 2006, the ability to use an instance for an hour, and to pay only for that hour, was big news. The pay-as-you-go model inspired our customers to think about new ways to develop, test, and run applications of all types."

But now from the 2nd of October, Amazon will start billing Linux virtual machines by the second, with a one minute minimum.

3 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Closing a loophole by cunina · · Score: 4, Informative

    There's a small but (until now) growing cottage industry that has helped heavy users of AWS get compute time very, very cheaply. Basically, if you can divide a huge compute job up into a large number of short, nearly stateless jobs, then you can launch a bunch of nodes, run them for less than fifteen minutes each, terminate them after the jobs run, and not have to pay for CPU time. This new move by Amazon puts that to an end.

  2. Everything old is new again. by alexhs · · Score: 4, Informative

    Back in the old days, you needed to buy or lease a server if you needed access to compute power," remembers Amazon's AWS blog.

    Someone didn't learn History, again.

    In the 1960s, [...] users were charged rent for the terminal, a charge for hours of connect time, a charge for seconds of CPU time, and a charge for kilobyte-months of disk storage.

    --
    I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
  3. Re:Impact on cost? by dacut · · Score: 3, Informative

    Disclaimer: I work for AWS, but I'm speaking personally here.

    This will always be cheaper for on-demand users. Previously, you were charged a full hour for any fractional usage. As soon as you start an instance, you're being billed -- even a start and stop a second later counted as 1 hour. (There is a free tier: you get 750 hours/month of t2.micro usage on Linux, RHEL, SLES, or Windows, during the first 12 months.)

    Let's say you had a batch job that ran for 12 minutes, 4x/day, on Amazon Linux on a c4.large instance in the Oregon region ($0.100/instance-hour). Before this change, you would have paid $12.20/month (4 instance-hours/day x 30.5 days/month x $0.100/instance-hour). Starting October 2, you will pay $2.44/month (0.8 instance-hours/day x 30.5 days/month x $0.100/instance-hour).

    AWS believes that cloud computing is going to be a high volume, relatively low margin business, and Amazon is very comfortable with these types of businesses. AWS has had (as of this writing) 62 price reductions in the last 9 years, largely in the absence of any competitive pressure. (And, since I pay for my personal usage -- no, we don't get a free lunch here! -- that's kept me happy as a customer.) Internally, it's a relentlessly customer-obsessed culture -- you can (and I have!) stopped a VP mid-speech by saying, "Wait, I don't think that's the right thing for the customer!" (We're also a very data-driven culture, so you're expected to have data to support this, of course. :-) )

    Hope this helps clear up some of the confusion. Note that there are some cases where billing will continue to be per-hour (or fraction thereof), such as marketplace usage -- Jeff Barr's blog post has all the details.