Posted On: Jun 14, 2021

Effective Jun 11, 2021, AWS has extended per second billing to Windows Server and SQL Server instances running on Amazon EC2. Customers will only pay for Windows Server and SQL Server instances that are launched in On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot form running on Amazon EC2 in one second increments, with a minimum of 1 minute.

Customers with use cases that require large number of instances running for irregular periods of time, such as dev/test, data processing, analytics, batch processing, image rendering and gaming applications have benefited from per second billing for Amazon Linux and Ubuntu. We have now extended per second billing to Windows Server and SQL Server instances so that customers can focus on improving their applications instead of maximizing usage to the hour.

The per second billing automatically applies to existing and new instances of Windows Server and SQL Server. This change is effective in all AWS Regions. The list prices and Spot Market prices remain on per-hour basis, but the customer bills are calculated down to the second. To learn more about running Windows applications on AWS, please visit the Windows on AWS web page.