Effective April 1, 2024, AWS has extended per-second billing to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)-based instances running on Amazon EC2. Customers will pay for RHEL-based instances that are launched in On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot form in one second increments, with a minimum of one 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 other operating systems including Amazon Linux, Ubuntu/ Ubuntu Pro, Windows Server, and SQL Server. We have now extended per-second billing to RHEL 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 RHEL-based instances, which include RHEL, RHEL HA, RHEL SQL, and RHEL HA SQL. 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 RHEL Workloads on AWS, please visit the Red Hat Solutions on AWS webpage.