Announcing Amazon EC2 per second billing

We are excited to announce that Amazon EC2 usage of Linux based instances that are launched in On-Demand, Reserved and Spot form will be billed on one second increments, with a minimum of 60 seconds.

Amazon EC2 Elastic GPUs and Amazon EBS volumes will also move from per hour billing to per second billing with a minimum of 60 seconds. As with EC2 instances, the list prices will continue to be displayed as it is today in GB-month for capacity, IOPS-month provisioned for io1 IOPS and per Million I/O requests for Magnetic IOPS.

Today, customers may have use cases that require large number of instances running for irregular periods of time, such as dev/test, data processing, analytics, batch processing, image rendering and gaming applications. To improve flexibility and allow customers to focus on their application instead of maximizing usage to the hour, with EC2 per second billing, customers can start, stop, and terminate EC2 instances and take comfort in the fact that their EC2 resources will not be charged for the minutes and seconds remaining in the hours their instances were running.

This change is effective in all AWS Regions and is effective immediately, for Linux instances that are newly launched or already running. Per-second billing is not currently applicable to instances running Microsoft Windows or Linux distributions that have a separate hourly charge.

List prices and Spot Market prices are still listed on a per-hour basis, but bills are calculated down to the second. With Reserved Instances usage you can launch, use, and terminate multiple instances within an hour and get the Reserved Instance Benefit for all of the instances. Bills will now show times in decimal form instead of in minutes and seconds.

Dedicated Instances, EBS Snapshots, and products in AWS Marketplace are still billed on an hourly basis.