Per-Second Billing for EC2 and EBS

Effective October 2nd, usage of Linux instances that are launched in On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot form will be billed in one-second increments. Similarly, provisioned storage for EBS volumes will be billed in one-second increments.

Per-second billing also applies to Amazon EMR and AWS Batch:

Amazon EMR – Our customers add capacity to their EMR clusters in order to get their results more quickly. With per-second billing for the EC2 instances in the clusters, adding nodes is more cost-effective than ever.

AWS Batch – Many of the batch jobs that our customers run complete in less than an hour. AWS Batch already launches and terminates Spot Instances; with per-second billing for the EC2 instances, batch processing will become even more economical.

One of the many advantages of cloud computing is the elastic nature of provisioning or deprovisioning resources as you need them. By billing usage down to the second we will enable customers to level up their elasticity, save money, and customers will be positioned to take advantage of continuing advances in computing.

Things to Know

This change is effective in all AWS Regions and will be effective October 2, for all Linux instances that are newly launched or already running. There is a 1 minute minimum charge per-instance.

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, as is Reserved Instance usage (you can launch, use, and terminate multiple instances within an hour and get the Reserved Instance Benefit for all of the instances).