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

Re:Impact on cost?

[Zocalo]

They're claiming it'll reduce them, but I suspect it's more nuanced than that. If you've been chopping your work up into smaller enough slices to qualified for free usage (15 minutes or less?) then it's absolutely going to cost you more, because that option seems to be going away. For everyone else though, I guess the de-facto subsidies of those in the former category are going to be coming off your bottom line, so yeah, there's probably going to a reduction for you.

You can bet that Amazon has crunched the numbers and the net overall revenue from EC2 will be going up though.