Amazon starts auctioning idle cycles

What’s old is new again, with a twist.  Cloud computing shares many similarities with 80’s mainframe computing. When mainframes ruled the IT universe, many owners of these expensive systems would sell otherwise idle time to outside parties to help offset costs. This was easy to implement when the jobs were run as batches and low priority jobs would be run at times of low or no activity.

It’s no secret that most of the servers in data center racks spend most of their lives in idle. So if you’re Amazon, why not sell those idle cycles? Technology now exists to schedule “batches” and to run them as systems are available in real time. The end user may see good performance most of the time, with service degrading only when there are spikes in processing demand.   If this catches on, look for a healthy market in idle cycles from many more providers.

Today the company announced its Spot Instances feature, which is a new pricing option designed to encourage users to buy and consume its idle computing resources.

Prices will change depending on supply and demand, Amazon said, but firms that bid the highest for its services will get access to the platform and be able to use it as and when they need to.

Amazon suggested that Spot Instances would be most suitable for customers that have flexible start and stop times for their rendering, data processing, modelling and analysis processing, adding that by working in this way they would be able to benefit from lower prices, and more importantly, only those prices that they are prepared to pay. (The Inquirer)