Amazon Web Services (AWS) is set to bill customers by the second from next month across all AWS regions.
Usage of Linux instances that are launched in On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot form will be billed in one-second increments from 2 October. So will provisioned storage for EBS volumes, and Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) and AWS Batch will also make the pricing move.
The move makes AWS billing more precise than Google or Microsoft, which charge by the minute.
In a blog post, Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS, said that by billing usage down to the second "we will enable customers to level up their elasticity, save money, and customers will be positioned to take advantage of continuing advances in computing".
"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," he also said.
But Barr added that the change to per-second billion could "inspire" customers to "innovate and to think about your compute-bound problems in new ways".
"One of the many advantages of cloud computing is the elastic nature of provisioning or deprovisioning resources as you need them," he explained. "By billing usage down to the second we will enable customers to level up their elasticity, save money, and customers will be positioned to take advantage of continuing advances in computing."
Per-second billing is not currently applicable to instances running Microsoft Windows or Linux distributions that have a separate hourly charge. Instead there is a one-minute minimum charge per-instance.
Also, List Prices and Spot Market prices are still listed on a per-hour basis, but bills are calculated down to the second, as is Reserved Instance usage.
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