Google extends per-second cloud billing, plays down potential savings

Cloud provider subtly points out it has offered per-second billing since 2013, following AWS' announcement last week

Google has extended per-second billing to a range of services on its Cloud Platform, after Amazon Web Services (AWS) made its own announcement last week.

Last week AWS said it would be making a number of its services available on a per-second basis from 2 October, in a move praised by partners.

Google has now beaten AWS to the punch, revealing that per-second billing has been made immediately available across a range of its services.

The search engine giant also pointed out that it has offered per-second billing for its Persistent Disks storage service since 2013.

However, Paul Nash, group product manager of Compute Engine at Google, played down the significance of the new billing model.

"In most cases, the difference between per-minute and per-second billing is very small," he said. "We estimate it as a fraction of a per cent.

"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 also highlighted that 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.