Google has extended per-second billing to a range of services on its Cloud Platform, after Amazon Web Services (AWS) moved to the same system last week.
Paul Nash, group product manager of Compute Engine at Google, played down the significance of the new billing model saying that Google has offered per-second billing for its Persistent Disks storage service since 2013. He said that the difference between per-minute and per-second billing is very small anyway.
“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.”
Google said its per-second model will be available on a range of operating systems including Windows, which AWS said would be excluded from its own per-second offering.
