Dive Brief:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) is launching the first pay per second billing model for a major cloud provider, threatening cloud rivals Microsoft and Google, according to a company announcement. Per second billing for all new and existing Linux instances on EC2 and EBS will be available starting October 2.
• The pay per second billing model is intended for companies in the gaming, ad tech and 3-D rendering fleets management sectors and will drive down the cost of computing workloads. There is a one-minute minimum for instance usage, according to the announcement.
• Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure have had pay per minute billing models since 2013, according to CNBC. Until now, Amazon only offered pay per hour billing. 

Dive Insight:

AWS is the longstanding cloud services king followed by Microsoft and Google. The public cloud market is expected to hit $246.8 billion this year with competition remaining high.

Differences in billing approaches are meant to accommodate the needs of businesses varying in size and computing requirements. AWS never complied with Google and Microsoft’s minute billing, which had a ten-minute instance minimum. However, the pay-per-second billing model is first of its kind for the public cloud space and meant to address the issue of short term computing needs.

The cloud leader said most of its customers run "batch jobs" that take less than an hour to complete yet paid for an hour’s worth of computing services. The flexibility in billing will reduce management assigned to workloads and their associated costs, according to the cloud leader.