On Tuesday, Amazon Web Services (S amzn) launched a new set of tiny "T2" compute instances that provide a known base-level of compute power but can also "burst up" as needed should computing needs change. That bursting can be financed by "CPU credits" that users accumulate during less busy times, according to the AWS blog.
The new instances suit applications such as remote desktops -- aka Amazon Workspaces; dev environments, low-traffic web sites and small databases. or any application marked by periods of low CPU use interrupted by high-usage spikes, according to Amazon.
The itty bitty instances, as seen in the chart, are considerably cheaper than larger instances -- m3.medium instance costs $0.070 per hour on demand compared to $0.052 for a t2.medium instance although m3 are backed by SSD storage while t2 instances are not.
This addition to the roster could be a good way to optimize costs while also being able to burst up for short processing jobs.
Amazon is famous for rolling out new instance types (and lower prices) as it sees fit and did so even before there were other public cloud options available. But now that there are other public clouds -- Microsoft(s msft) Azure, Google(s goog) Cloud, in town, you'd be forgiven if you saw this as a reaction to newer (and cheaper) rivals. Digital Ocean, for example, offers SSD-backed compute instances (or "Droplets" in Digital Ocean parlance) for $5.00 a month or $0.007 per hour.