The cloud market leader – Amazon Web Services, on Monday, made a significant move to charge its customers by the seconds rather than by the hour for use of its EC2- the prime computing engine at the core of Amazon Web Services.
AWS that was launched in 2006, used to charge for its services by the hour. But Alphabet’s Google, introduced in 2013, came in competition with AWS which started charging by the minute, with a 10-minute minimum. Later, Microsoft also introduced its Azure services and things became difficult for AWS.
And now Amazon is making a good comeback by becoming even more granular with charging just by seconds, with a one-minute minimum.
“Today, services like AWS Lambda prove that we can do a lot of useful work in a short time. 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. 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,” Amazon’s Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post.
Earlier, the charge-per-hour scheme of EC2 cloud computing service was a big deal, but with the availability of other options, customers paying for a full hour even on using an instance for only few minutes, was being perceived as a problem.
The per-second pricing means the companies will end up now paying less money for the workloads and might also lead them to be more experimental with their use of EC2. This move of Amazon is a classic one: lowering pricing to gain the market share.
Also read: AWS joins Cloud Native Computing Foundation to support open-source containerization projects
The per-minute billing model of AWS will be available from 2nd October, which will be applicable only with virtual servers running the Linux operating system. The Dedicated Per Region Fee, EBS Snapshots, and AWS Marketplace products will still be billed on an hourly basis.
