Next month, Amazon Web Services will charge for elastic cloud compute (EC2) Linux instances and elastic block store (EBS) volumes by the second instead of by the hour.

When AWS launched its EC2 cloud computing service back in 2006, it offered per-hour billing, a revolutionary idea at the time. Then, as competitors entered the market, they began to charge by the minute - first Google in 2013, quickly followed by Microsoft. Now, AWS plans to one up them.

Every second counts

AWS time
AWS time – Sebastian Moss/DCD

“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,” AWS’ chief evangelist, Jeff Barr, said in a blog post.

“Effective October 2nd, usage of Linux instances that are launched in On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot form will be billed in one-second increments. Similarly, provisioned storage for EBS volumes will be billed in one-second increments.”

There is, however, a one minute minimum charge per-instance, and at the moment it doesn’t apply to instances running Microsoft Windows or Linux distributions that have a separate hourly charge. 

Barr said that he expects the change to reduce costs for some, and increase customers’ willingness to experiment.

The move brings EC2 and EBS’ billing system closer to that of AWS Lamda, its serverless service that is charged in 100 millisecond increments.