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In the beginning of October this year Amazon announced per-second billing for EC2 instances. This potentially could be a big cost reduction for me. However Amazon also says this billing is platform dependent:

Per-second billing is not currently applicable to instances running Microsoft Windows or Linux distributions that have a separate hourly charge. Marketplace AMIs that do not have a separate hourly charge are eligible for per-second billing.

Does this new type of billing apply also to custom AMIs based on Amazon Linux? How can I check what kind of billing I have?

Marek Raki
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because billing questions should be asked of the vendor. – Jenny D Nov 18 '17 at 07:44
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    ^^ Not sure I agree with that. One could also argue that technical questions should be asked of the vendor. And sure, they could.. but AWS billing can get very technical, and there is plenty that can be shared on it in a public forum. – Tim Malone Mar 25 '19 at 02:59

1 Answers1

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The separate, hourly charge is a license fee in addition to the actual charge for the VM.

Amazon Linux does not have such a charge, unless your AMI is based on a Marketplace AMI that has an hourly license fee and also happens to be descended from Amazon Linux.

If you built these images yourself from the official and free Amazon Linux AMIs, then they should be eligible for per-second billing.

Michael - sqlbot
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  • We used one selected from Community AMIs tab. Is there any way to check it just to be sure if it works? – Marek Raki Nov 17 '17 at 13:51
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    If it's from the community AMIs tab I believe it's entirely safe. The licensed AMIs are at https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace and it's very clear when you're using one - there are very clear extra signup steps. – ceejayoz Nov 17 '17 at 13:54