[espeed]

GCE instances are charged in 1 min increments (https://cloud.google.com/pricing/compute-engine), not 1 hour increments like AWS (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/).

1 min increment billing enables you to spin up massive Web clusters to handle spikes or Hadoop clusters so big that you can process the entire dataset it a few minutes, while paying less than you would for a smaller AWS cluster that's billed by the hour.

[_delirium]

It's definitely finer-grained, but there's still a 10-minute minimum per instance: billing is only per-minute above 10 minutes. So if you run a massively parallel 2-minute Hadoop job, you pay num_instances x 10min. Admittedly that's still a win, since AWS would bill you for 6x as much instance time. But it's not a 30x differential as you might guess from the headline "hourly" vs. "per-minute" pricing.

[simplemath]

A fair point, but the scaling granularity advantage is a powerful cost win nonetheless