Today, customers may have 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. To improve flexibility and allow customers to focus on their application instead of maximizing usage to the hour, with EC2 per second billing, customers can start, stop, and terminate EC2 instances and take comfort in the fact that their EC2 resources will not be charged for the minutes and seconds remaining in the hours their instances were running.