It really depends on how elastic your workload is. Imagine, if amazon had 1 day/week/month minimum for the VMs. You'd run into the same issues (you wouldn't r

It really depends on how elastic your workload is. Imagine, if amazon had 1 day/week/month minimum for the VMs. You'd run into the same issues (you wouldn't respond to a spike in demand if it was only going to last 2 hours). I think the point is: Smaller billing windows allow you to be more responsive to your load and be able to shut down faster and save more money.