On September 19th, Amazon’s public cloud service, Amazon Web Services, announced that from October 2nd, the company will charge customers who use their EC2 virtual servers a second fee.
This move will have a significant impact since it has been billed by the hour since AWS launched in 2006. In 2013, Alphabet, a subsidiary of Alphabet, announced that AWS's direct competitor billed by the minute. Microsoft's Azure is also close behind. Now Amazon has launched a counterattack to fine tune the way people use computing resources.
While billing by second may mean that some companies will eventually pay less for certain workloads, this change may also result in companies being more cautious about using EC2 in certain types of calculations.
This is Amazon's classic move, which is to reduce the price to gain market share. Microsoft actually launched a second-by-second billing service earlier this year, but it is aimed at processing containers, which are new technologies that are not as widely used as virtual machines. (small)