Amazon Auctions Cloud Capacity -- Redmond Channel Partner

Pender's Blog by Lee Pender, RCPU Editor

Amazon Auctions Cloud Capacity

This is a pretty interesting little model, actually. Amazon's auctioning little unused chunks of its cloud capacity as part of a program called Spot Instances. From Jeff Schwartz's RCPmag.com story linked above, here's Amazon's CTO talking about the plan:

"Customers bid any price they like on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long their bid exceeds the current Spot Price," said Amazon CTO Werner Vogels in a blog post. "Spot Instances are ideal for tasks that can be flexible as to when they start and stop. This gives our customers an exciting new approach to IT cost management."

We'll be interested to see whether other cloud vendors pick up on this idea, as well.

Posted by Lee Pender on December 16, 2009

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