[Alain-lf]

AWS charge by the hour, as soon as you power up an instance you are charged a full hour.

If you start and stop one instance 60 time in an hour, you will be charged 60 hours.

So scaling down on a dime and scalling right back up is more expensive than doing nothing.

[toomuchtodo]

Bingo. If you've scaled up, you stay scaled up for the instance hour. Otherwise, you just threw money away.

[brianwawok]

GCE only need 10 minutes and then you can spin down.

[flippy2]

That's not at all true. You would be charged for exactly one hour.

Instance hours are just rounded up.

Source: I auto scale my companies entire stack.

[Alain-lf]

Amazon and people who have been hit by this seem to disagree with you:

"Pricing is per instance-hour consumed for each instance, from the time an instance is launched until it is terminated or stopped. Each partial instance-hour consumed will be billed as a full hour."

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

"You are billed for an EC2 instance-hour for each hour or partial hour (rounded up) that your instance is in the “running” state. Instances that are in any other state (“stopped”, “pending”, etc.) are not billed."

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/ec2-i...

Here's a company that got hit hard by that behavior :

"A little-discussed fact about AWS EC2 pricing is that users are billed for each server that runs for any partial hour it runs. That means if a user starts a server and then kills it within five minutes, he is still billed for the full hour. That seems acceptable, but if a user kills a server and replaces it with a new server of the exact same type and location, this move doubles the bill."

http://searchaws.techtarget.com/tip/Paying-the-price-when-an...

You should probably take a look at this, you are probably costing your company a lot of money.