Amazon Web Services (AWS) is to move to a per-second billing model for its EC2 and EBS services from October 2.

The move aims to go one step ahead of its competitors, Microsoft, Google et al, who have been since 2013 been utilising per-minute billing for its services.

Given the developments of products such as AWS Lambda, among others in the serverless realm, it makes sense to make the shift. AWS said many of its customers had been ‘dreaming up applications’ for EC2 that utilised a larger number of instances in a short space of time.

The move will affect usage of Linux instances launched in on-demand, reserved and spot form, as well as Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) and AWS Batch.

Jeff Barr, AWS chief evangelist, noted in a post announcing the news the price aspect is just the start of what can be achieved with per-second billing.

“I believe that this change will inspire you to innovate and to think about your compute-bound problems in new ways,” he wrote. “How can you use it to improve your support for continuous integration? Can it change the way that you provision transient environments for your dev and test workloads? What about your analytics, batch processing, and 3D rendering?

“One of the many advantages of cloud computing is the elastic nature of provisioning or deprovisioning resources as you need them,” Barr added. “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.”

You can read the full blog post here.