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When I use AWS autoscaling to launch instances, am I being charged for the full hour every time I launch an instance?

Lets say my auto scaling is being triggered every 20 minutes, followed by launching 6 instances that runs a job that takes 10 minutes to execute, and then the instances terminate. So in an hour range I will be launching 18 machines in total.

Will I be charged for 18 hours, or 180 minutes (18 * 10 minute to execute)?

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In short: yes.

With Amazon EC2, you pay for each instance-hour and is rounded up. So for example:

  • An instance is created at 12:01 and is terminated at 14:32. This equals 2 hours and 31 minutes, which equals three hours of usage.
  • An instance is created at 12:03 and is terminated at 12:48. This equals 45 minutes, which equals one hour of billed usage.
  • An instance is created at 13:43 and is terminated at 14:18. This equals 35 minutes, which equals one hour of billed usage, even though the instance lifetime spans two hours.
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  • That's a bummer, it's makes autoscaling very expensive for a lot of use cases - useful only for long running jobs Oct 12, 2015 at 20:56
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    @OferVelich Short-running jobs are more what AWS Lambda or AWS Elastic Container Service are for. Or just keep the instance on and run the jobs on the already-running instance.
    – ceejayoz
    Oct 12, 2015 at 21:00
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    This answer doesn't seem to address what happens when AWS terminates your spot instance involuntarily. The final (uually partial) instance-hour in which AWS (not the user, not auto-scaling, not the instance itself) terminates a spot instance is not billed. aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#spot-instances Oct 12, 2015 at 23:45
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    @Michael-sqlbot the question didn't ask about involuntary termination of spot instances, so it's hardly surprising that the answer doesn't address it.
    – womble
    Oct 13, 2015 at 1:40
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    @womble, fair point. Re-reading my comment, it comes across as being critical of the answer, and I really did not intend that. +1. Involuntary termination is always a possibility though, and seemed to me like a noteworthy exception to "rounded up" that bears mentioning in discussion of the cost of spot. Oct 13, 2015 at 2:30

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