2 years ago

Category: Security

Fifteen years ago today I wrote the blog post that launched the Amazon EC2 Beta. Undaunted, I brought my laptop along on vacation, and had to cover it with a towel so that I could see the screen as I wrote.

It would be easy to make the case that any or all of these features were must-haves for the launch, but none of them were, and our customers started to put EC2 to use right away.

Pricing – While it was always obvious that we would charge for the use of EC2, we had to decide on the units that we would charge for, and ultimately settled on instance hours.

Even so, our customers had use cases that could benefit from more fine-grained billing, and we launched per-second billing for EC2 and EBS back in 2017.