[6cxs2hd6]

It seems like this fits two needs, for smaller companies and/or people just getting started with EC2.

1. Laziness. Which I don't necessarily mean in a pejorative sense. Maybe someone just doesn't have time, yet, to learn/configure/maintain spinning up an instance for limited times.

2. Single instance. To spin up an instance, you need another computer. If you want that "manager" computer to be an instance at EC2, too, now you need two instances. With this approach, you can set up just one instance and get much of the same economic benefit.

EDIT: Also...

3. Predictable cost. If your manual spun-up instance turns out to need to run for 4 hours instead of 2, you get a bigger bill. With the t2 instances, you'll get a slower compute (if you run out of "credits") but not a bigger bill.

Again, this probably appeals most to small/new customers?

[IanCal]

> Single instance. To spin up an instance, you need another computer.

I think you can do this with cloudformation, having it respond to the size of a work queue, however:

> Maybe someone just doesn't have time, yet, to learn/configure/maintain spinning up an instance for limited times.

This is why I can't answer the question above for certain, I got about that far in documentation and went off to find a simpler solution (for me, tutum: https://www.tutum.co/ )

[eropple]

As far as #2 goes, you don't need another instance. You can do it with time-based autoscaling groups. This does present problems of its own, but ones that are not hard to solve.

[asdfaoeu]

Yeah exactly. I do think however a method where they automatically repurchase credits when it runs low such that it just ends up costing something like double a normal instance when it does run low.