Amazon should definitely be feeling the pressure from Google on this. Per-hour billing has always been a pain to manage for offline/batch workloads. If you're

Amazon should definitely be feeling the pressure from Google on this. Per-hour billing has always been a pain to manage for offline/batch workloads. If you're interested in leveraging advanced cost-saving techniques on AWS compute and storage, we're currently building something in the cloud HPC space that does exactly this. Nothing public yet, but email in my profile for more. Our system automatically manages elastic fleets of instances and right-sizes instances to their workloads (including spot and lambdas), and also makes it easy to reduce TCO on storage. It's agnostic in terms of deployment (hosted vs. bring-your-own-VPC).