Amazon Web Services will be billed to customers per second

From October 2 Amazon Web Services will be invoiced to customers per second rather than the minute and for all competitors.

4 years after invoicing its customers per minute, AWS takes one more step with billing per second. Launched in 2006, AWS services were initially billed on time. In 2013, Google announces a billing per minute with a minimum of 10 minutes. Microsoft Azure then AWS follow this move. Today Amazon relaunches the fight with the Linux virtual machines which will be invoiced to the second of use. The idea is of course to encourage customers to spend on this infrastructure for some computer work. This new device comes at a time when it is whispering that Microsoft Azure would be moving ahead of AWS in terms of market shares, or at least in terms of market share gains.

The new pricing concerns EC2 instances (Compute & Storage) and Amazon EMR and AWS Batch on Linux platforms in all regions where the company operates.