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

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.

Comments

Closing a loophole

[cunina]

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.

Everything old is new again.

[alexhs]

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.