AWS to switch to per-second billing for Linux instances

Amazon Web Services customers will soon pay for their elastic cloud compute (EC2) Linux instances and elastic block store (EBS) volumes by the second instead of by the hour, the company announced today.

Per-second billing applies to newly launched and already running Linux instances, with a minimum charge of one minute for each.

It will be available in all AWS regions from October 3 Australian time. AWS' competitors Google Compute Cloud and Microsoft Azure currently bill by the minute.

Microsoft Windows instances or Linux distributions with a separate hourly charge cannot be paid for by the second, AWS said.

Amazon's big data processing and analysis offering Elastic MapReduce (EMR) and its Batch service will also see per-second pricing applied.

Customers will still see per-hour charges on their bills but the cost will be calculated down to the second. The amount of time used will now be shown in decimal form. 

The new billing model draws similarities to the AWS Lambda serverless environment, which is charged in 100 millisecond increments with the final price varying according to how much memory is allocated, along with time used and number of requests.

Amazon believes the new pricing model will be cheaper for many customer workloads.