Following AWS, Google Compute Engine also moves to per-second billing

A week ago, AWS announced that it would rapidly change billing per second for users of its EC2 service. This is not a big surprise, while Google today announced a very similar move.

The Google Engine, Container Engine, Cloud Dataproc, and Flex Engine environments will now have per-second billing, starting immediately (AWS users should wait until October 2). This new pricing system extends to preferred virtual machines and machines running high-end operating systems such as Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Enterprise Linux Server. With this, AWS, which offers only invoicing per second for basic Linux instances and not for Windows Server and other Linux distributions on its platform, currently has a separate time load.

Like AWS, Google will charge for at least one minute.

Interestingly, Google has already introduced billing per second for its persistent disks, compromised GPUs and discounts.

While Google contends that for most use cases, billing per second will result in very small billing changes, the company also notes that there are many applications where the level up and down has a lot of meaning (websites, mobile apps and data processing jobs, for example).

"This is probably the reason why we have not heard many customers asking per second," said Paul Nash, Group Product Manager for Compute Engine, in today's announcement. "But we do not want you to choose between your morning coffee and your basic hours, so we're happy to bring billing per second to your virtual machines with a minimum of one minute."

Thus, while Google is not revealed at this time, this is clearly a reaction to the evolution of Amazon, although the company considers it as another box in a comparison of features between the two services in the cloud.

What about Microsoft?

So far, Microsoft has not made a similar move. "With Azure Container Instances, we paved the way for billing per second, with a service that runs in seconds and takes seconds, we realized that it was incredibly critical to give customers that granularity of costs," said Corey Sanders , Microsoft's Product Manager for Azure Compute, told me at the Microsoft Ignite conference when I asked him about his company's plans. "I look forward to seeing other clouds continue and to offer customers the best flexibility for their pricing."

As for regular virtual machines, Sanders remained in the message and noted that Microsoft wanted to focus on the containers because that is where billing per second is the most logical. "We are always looking to improve the billing constructions in our platform and make it more agile and more agile for our customers," he said. I would be very surprised if Microsoft did not try to verify invoicing per second in the near future.