Public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services on Monday said that on Oct. 2 it will start charging its customers by the second for use of its popular EC2 virtual slices of servers in its data centers.

The move is historically significant. Since AWS became available in 2006, it has charged by the hour. Then, in 2013, Alphabet's Google, which had introduced its direct competitor to AWS a year earlier, said it would start charging by the minute, after a 10-minute minimum. Microsoft's Azure followed suit shortly thereafter.

Now Amazon is hitting back by becoming even more granular when it comes to making people pay only for the computing resources they use, with a one-minute minimum.

The price change is only applicable for Linux virtual machines, AWS' chief evangelist, Jeff Barr, wrote in a blog post.

While the per-second pricing could mean companies will end up paying less money for certain workloads, the change might also lead companies to be more experimental with their use of EC2 instances for certain types of computing.