Per-Second Billing Clarification

Hi,
Hopefully, I am following your question correctly. With ElasticBeanstalk you will be paying for the underlying EC2 and storage resources. For EC2 CPU utilization, it does not matter if you are running at capacity versus idle, you will still be paying the per second billing charges. There is no monthly minimum or daily charge. For example, if you have an EC2 instance running for 2 seconds at capacity, and the rest of the time the EC2 instance is idle for 1 hour, and the other EC2 instance, you have running at full capacity for 1 hour, you will still be charged the same amount.

Perhaps, you were thinking about running your application in AWS Lambda? Then you only have to pay for the CPU that you use. However, at some point there will be an inflection point where it will be cheaper with running with an EC2 instance if your application is running more often than being idle.
Hope that helps,
-randy

Hi Randy,

Thanks for the information, I think I might be getting confused with the wording on https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/ : "With On-Demand instances, you pay for compute capacity by per hour or per second depending on which instances you run."

i have just received this response from AWS Support, which supports per second billing of instances:
"
I have confirmed that EC2 usage is billed on one second increments, with a minimum of 60 seconds. I also found that it takes cost of unused minutes and seconds in an hour off of the bill, so you can focus on improving your applications instead of maximizing usage to the hour.
"
Using the cost calculator ( https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html ) a 50% utilization of an EC2 instance costs half that of a 100% utilization, this doesn't track with your example unless billing was calculated per hour.

I guess the easiest way is going to be to launch it and see.

Cheers,
Stephen

Edited by: StephenWNZ on Sep 22, 2019 2:38 PM