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AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

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Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#11

Likely due to GCP competition. I believe GCP was always per-second? [Edit: Misremember that, they were always per-minute. Lots of good information below directly form the related parties.] Azure looks to be per-hour [Edit: Wrong again, they are per-minute as well. Oddly enough, I did check their pricing page before, but missed the per-minute paragraph and only saw the hourly pricing] but I'm seeing something about co…

Per-minute for GCP, but I am not sure it makes that much of a difference. Anyway, now the Game is on

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#12

Likely due to GCP competition. I believe GCP was always per-second? [Edit: Misremember that, they were always per-minute. Lots of good information below directly form the related parties.] Azure looks to be per-hour [Edit: Wrong again, they are per-minute as well. Oddly enough, I did check their pricing page before, but missed the per-minute paragraph and only saw the hourly pricing] but I'm seeing something about co…

GCP VMs are per-minute, with a minimum of 10 minutes (vs AWS' new minimum of 1 minute). Second resolution is nice, but I doubt it makes much difference in pricing for most workloads. https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#billingmodel Azure's containers don't use a full VM-- they're more like AWS Lambda or other serverless frameworks, so they do per-second billing with no minimums. Disclaimer: I work at Google on C…

Azure's EC2 equivalent is Azure Virtual Machines[0], which bills by the minute.

[0] - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/virtual-machines/

"Keep your budget in check with low-cost, per-minute billing. You only pay for the compute time you use."

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#14

Likely due to GCP competition. I believe GCP was always per-second? [Edit: Misremember that, they were always per-minute. Lots of good information below directly form the related parties.] Azure looks to be per-hour [Edit: Wrong again, they are per-minute as well. Oddly enough, I did check their pricing page before, but missed the per-minute paragraph and only saw the hourly pricing] but I'm seeing something about co…

I was under the impression Azure was also per minute, and AWS was the last hold out of hourly billing among the big three until today.

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#16

Likely due to GCP competition. I believe GCP was always per-second? [Edit: Misremember that, they were always per-minute. Lots of good information below directly form the related parties.] Azure looks to be per-hour [Edit: Wrong again, they are per-minute as well. Oddly enough, I did check their pricing page before, but missed the per-minute paragraph and only saw the hourly pricing] but I'm seeing something about co…

GCP VMs are per-minute, with a minimum of 10 minutes (vs AWS' new minimum of 1 minute). Second resolution is nice, but I doubt it makes much difference in pricing for most workloads. https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#billingmodel Azure's containers don't use a full VM-- they're more like AWS Lambda or other serverless frameworks, so they do per-second billing with no minimums. Disclaimer: I work at Google on C…

Hyper.sh runs docker containers, not VM's, and has per-second billing with a minimum of 10s.

I really want to use them to parallelise CI test runs, but haven't gotten round to setting this up yet.

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#17

Serverless advocates/engies are probably the only people celebrating this, everyone else keeps waiting for self renew instance reservation... last time i forgot about them it was too late.

The market for this is much broader. We do a bunch of data science so spinning up a heavy machine and only getting billed for the 5 minutes usage is a massive saving for us. I'm quite excited by this news!

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#18
Really welcome, although per millisecond would be better.

It's now possible to boot operating systems in milliseconds and have them carry out a task (for example respond to a web request) and disappear again. Trouble is the clouds (AWS, Google, Azure, Digital Ocean) do not have the ability to support such fast OS boot times. Per second billing is a step in the right direction but needs to go further to millisecond billing, and clouds need to support millisecond boot times.

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#19

Really welcome, although per millisecond would be better. It's now possible to boot operating systems in milliseconds and have them carry out a task (for example respond to a web request) and disappear again. Trouble is the clouds (AWS, Google, Azure, Digital Ocean) do not have the ability to support such fast OS boot times. Per second billing is a step in the right direction but needs to go further to millisecond bi…

Sounds like you're describing AWS Lambda / serverless architecture. But maybe I'm not understanding your use case?

Re: AWS announces per-second billing for EC2 instances

#20

Really welcome, although per millisecond would be better. It's now possible to boot operating systems in milliseconds and have them carry out a task (for example respond to a web request) and disappear again. Trouble is the clouds (AWS, Google, Azure, Digital Ocean) do not have the ability to support such fast OS boot times. Per second billing is a step in the right direction but needs to go further to millisecond bi…

Just curious here, what OS can do millisecond boot times? How many milliseconds are you talking? And the constant boot time of the OS is so much less than the OS responding to the web request that this is actually worth it?
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