Pay per minute instead of pay par hour
One thing that I like the most (and most needed by my business) about cloud computing is ability to fine tune the processing power available to exactly match the demand.
In this respect, I would even more interested if Azure was letting me adjust the number of instances much more aggressively, that is to say if I was charged by the minute and not by the hour.
Indeed, if I have a process that take 1h15, I end-up paying for 2h while I would really prefer to pay 1h15 since I have made the effort to optimize my process so that it runs in 1h15 and not 1h55.
Joannes Vermorel
shared this idea
8 comments
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Dave Fellows
commented
This is crucial for cost-effective on-demand computing. e.g. spin up 500 instances to do a 10hr job in 5-10 minutes. Yes, it takes at least 10 minutes to start these instances up (see my feature request about this http://bit.ly/aSxw0u), however there's still benefit in doing this.
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Steven Nagy
commented
For those that want to pay per minute because they want to turn a 1 hour task into a 10 minute task, there's no point. It takes 10mins to spin up a new instance. I'm not sure this is a good idea. Also people are architecting to the current pricing strategy and so its not good to change that strategy too often. Preferably never. Or less.
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Neil commented
It might help to specify that GAE stands for "Google App Engine". Pay as you go, starting at 0 and scaling very smoothly with actual use, will attract the start-ups that end up big.
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Mike
commented
The more machines used to parallel process a task, the more this kind of cost rounding hurts the consumer. Say I can process a queue in 3 hours with 1 machine, throwing 3 instances at the problem maintains the same cost, but cuts the time to 1 hour. But throwing 6 machines at the problem doubles costs for the same total work and data center usage. Is the per-hour-billing a mechanism to throttle peak usage?
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Phillip
commented
Even if it's not a per-minute basis, I would like to see this in no more then 10 minute billing increments. 5 minutes would even be better. This is, if you couldn't offer a per minute basis. But I do agree that I would not want to pay for 45 minutes of a product I never received.
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Joannes Vermorel
commented
kotsoft, yes, currently usage will be upper rounded to the next hour. Hence, if you use 10 regular VM for 10min each, it will cost you $12 and not $2.
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kotsoft commented
yeah, i was wondering, if i'm able to distribute my application to do something on many computers and as a result, what would normally take an hour takes like maybe 10 minutes, then would i be charged an hour for each computer that processed some stuff?
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Thanks for explaining Joannes, I understand the request. Others have any specific requests on this one? What are others' scenarios in which they need this?
