Which of the following cloud pricing models charges users based on the exact amount of resources consumed, measured per second, minute, or hour?

Solution

Pay-as-you-go is the most flexible cloud pricing model wherein users pay only for the resources they actually consume, measured at fine granularity (per second for AWS EC2, per minute for some services). There is no upfront commitment or long-term contract. Reserved Instances offer significant discounts (up to 75%) in exchange for committing to 1- or 3-year terms. Spot/Preemptible Instances offer the cheapest prices but can be terminated by the provider with short notice when demand rises. Dedicated Hosts provide physical server isolation for licensing compliance. BYOL allows using existing software licenses in the cloud.