AWS will charge EC2 customers by the second

Amazon Web Services (AWS) will soon be raising its prices to better compete against its rivals Microsoft and Google in the public cloud market.

The company announced on Monday that as of October 2, it will begin charging customers by the second to use its EC2 virtual slices in its data centers. This is a big change in AWS' pricing model, as it has charged by the hour since its release in 2006.

A year after Alphabet's Google entered the public cloud market, it announced that it would begin to charge customers by the minute with a 10-minute minimum. Microsoft's Azure also adopted a similar pricing model shortly after.

By charging customers that use its Linux virtual machines by the second, AWS will give them the ability to only pay for the computing resources they use and this move may help the company regain some lost market share. There will be a one-minute minimum and certain types of workloads could see companies paying a lot less for cloud services.

AWS' chief evangelist, Jeff Barr provided more details on the per second pricing model in a blog post, saying:

"Effective October 2, 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."

As demand for public cloud services has increased, AWS is taking the necessary steps to stay one step ahead of its competitors in the space.

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