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:Closing a loophole

[tomhath]

I suspected the real rationale was something like this. It's even hinted at in TFA:

Many of our customers are dreaming up applications for EC2 that can make good use of a large number of instances for shorter amounts of time, sometimes just a few minutes.

I can't blame Amazon for the change though. In fact, it seems that charging by the hour was more underhanded.

Re: Impact on cost?

[Zocalo]

Not true, it depends on how they adjust the rates they charge per timeslot vs. how many people were getting in under that 15 minute (or whatever it is) free window. If you are now going to be paying a total of $1/s for your EC2 server farm, then the breakeven point would be at $3,600/hour for that same server farm - if you're previous bill was more than $3,600/hour - including any dead time - then you are going to see a reduction in total costs. If you are in the situation where time is money and you are deliberately chopping up a task into a lot of parallel tasks so it finsishes faster and swallowing the resultant expense of having multiple servers sitting idle when the job completes, then the savings could add up pretty fast. The potential win for Amazon comes from all those who were previously getting free minutes through massive parallelisation to get under the free usage bar; that previously written off revenue is now going to be billed, and if Amazon has done their homework almost certainly will exceed the savings made by those in the former group.