Amazon Web Services Is Now Charging By The Second

Amazon announced Monday that its Amazon EC2 service would switch from a pay-by-the-hour model to a pay-by-the-second model beginning October 2. The switch will enable Amazon EC2 customers to save money on processing shorter projects, the company said, giving companies more freedom and flexibility.

The Elastic Compute Cloud Service, known as EC2 and originally launched in 2006, gives businesses a cloud-based solution to computer capacity problems, which makes cloud computing easier for developers.

The new pay model has a one-minute minimum, according to Business Insider, and only applies to Linux operating systems for the immediate future, which means the majority of users will still be relegated to the old pay-by-the-hour model. The Dedicated Per Region Fee, EBS Snapshots, and AWS Marketplace products will also continue to be charged by the hour.

“When we launched EC2 back in 2006, the ability to use an instance for an hour, and to pay only for that hour, was big news,” said AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr in Amazon’s blog post. “The pay-as-you-go model inspired our customers to think about new ways to develop, test, and run applications of all types.”

“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,” Barr said.

Another Amazon service, AWS Lambda, has been following a pay-by-the-millisecond model since it was released in 2014.

Alphabet, Google’s parent company, and Microsoft have both released competing cloud services that charged by the minute in the past five years, which both carried 10-minute minimums instead of one. Amazon’s AWS program is in direct competition with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

In the second quarter of this year, Amazon has claimed more than 30 percent of the cloud infrastructure services market, according to CNBC, making it the industry leader. Microsoft Azure trailed in a distant second place with just under 14 percent of the market share. AWS also earned the company $4.1 billion in revenue in the second quarter.

Amazon stock currently sits at $969.86, while Google’s stock is at $936.86 and Microsoft stock sits at $75.44.

[Featured image by David Ryder/Getty Images]