The wait has ended! AWS finally supports billing per second for EC2 instances... Well for those running "free" Linux versions that is. Windows and Linux License payers will have to wait a little longer.
With this change, we no longer have to worry about instance timing and which instance was available the longest etc. Simply adding systems on demand whenever, wherever for which purpose it might be; is finally here and greatly adds the opportunity to endlessly scale up and down for your containers, functions and applications.
Instances spawned and/or running from the 2nd of October 2017, will automatically be billed per second. Instances with separate fees for licensing are excluded.
There is a minimum charge of 1 minute per-instance. Also don't forget to request limit increase of per server-type. Standard limits are: 20 per server-type and 50 servers per region.
To read more: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-per-second-billing-for-ec2-instances-and-ebs-volumes/