Google Claps Back at AWS, Extends Per-Second Cloud Billing

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That didn’t take long.

A week after Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced per-second billing for EC2 and EBS instances, Google said that starting today, per-second billing is available on a number of its cloud services, including Compute Engine.

Paul Nash, group product manager, Compute Engine, said that its per-second billing option is now available on Compute Engine, Container Engine, Cloud Dataproc, and App Engine flexible environment VMs.

"These offerings join Persistent Disks, which has been billed by the second since its launch in 2013, as well as committed use discounts and GPUs; both of which have used per-second billing since their introduction," Nash said in a blog post. 

The changes come shortly after Google introduced network tiers which allow customers to save money by opting for less performance.

Unlike AWS’ per-second billing, which is only available to instances running Linux, Google per-second billing is applicable to all VMs, including Preemptible VMs and VMs running Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Enterprise Linux Server.

“In most cases, the difference between per-minute and per-second billing is very small -- we estimate it as a fraction of a percent,” Nash said. “On the other hand, changing from per-hour billing to per-minute billing makes a big difference for applications (especially websites, mobile apps and data processing jobs) that get traffic spikes. The ability to scale up and down quickly could come at a significant cost if you had to pay for those machines for the full hour when you only needed them for a few minutes.”

Related:What’s Different about Google’s New Cloud Connectivity Service

Nash said Google hasn’t heard many customers asking for per-second billing, “but, we don’t want to make you choose between your morning coffee and your core hours, so we’re pleased to bring per-second billing to your VMs, with a one-minute minimum.”

451 Research’s Dr. Owen Rogers told ITPro last week that more granular workloads will push hyperscale cloud providers to offer more granular pricing options, drilling down workloads to the second.