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Comment by JosephLark | Hacker News Reader

Likely due to GCP competition. I believe GCP was always per-second? [Edit: Misremember that, they were always per-minute. Lots of good information below directly form the related parties.]

Azure looks to be per-hour [Edit: Wrong again, they are per-minute as well. Oddly enough, I did check their pricing page before, but missed the per-minute paragraph and only saw the hourly pricing] but I'm seeing something about container instances possibly being per-second.

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GCP VMs are per-minute, with a minimum of 10 minutes (vs AWS' new minimum of 1 minute). Second resolution is nice, but I doubt it makes much difference in pricing for most workloads. https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#billingmodel

Azure's containers don't use a full VM-- they're more like AWS Lambda or other serverless frameworks, so they do per-second billing with no minimums.

Disclaimer: I work at Google on Container Engine.

Azure's EC2 equivalent is Azure Virtual Machines[0], which bills by the minute.

[0] - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/virtual-machines/

"Keep your budget in check with low-cost, per-minute billing. You only pay for the compute time you use."

Hyper.sh runs docker containers, not VM's, and has per-second billing with a minimum of 10s.

I really want to use them to parallelise CI test runs, but haven't gotten round to setting this up yet.

Check https://github.com/hyperhq/hykins

I would disagree on no minimums and equivalency to lambda et al, as azure container instances charge a create fee (iirc its equivalent to 100 seconds of their minimum configuration) which sits on top of the per-second billing.

The minimum of 1 minute makes a difference... Granted 10min is not that much of a problem :)

We don't mind per-minute billing on GCP, but would love to get the minimum down to 1 minute or even less. We have some tasks that finish under 4 minutes where scaling horizontally instead of vertically makes much more sense to us.

I was under the impression Azure was also per minute, and AWS was the last hold out of hourly billing among the big three until today.

Per-minute for GCP, but I am not sure it makes that much of a difference. Anyway, now the Game is on

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