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2011-02-17 13:54:58
Feb 13th 2011, 19:31 by L.S.
LESS than a year ago Babbage wrote an article, entitled Clouds under the
hammer , in The Economist discussing whether computing capacity would become a
tradable commodity. In the conclusion he sided with the sceptics, arguing that
virtual machines the main unit of measurement in cloud computing would
increasingly move about, but mostly within clouds controlled by a single
company ( private clouds ) or trusted federations of public clouds (where
anyone can buy capacity).
One of the people quoted in the article, Reuven Cohen, the founder of Enomaly,
a maker of software that allows firms to build public clouds, was more
optimistic. He has now proven that he was right: today Enomaly will launch
SpotCloud, the world s first spot market for cloud computing.
Fundamentally, SpotCloud works like other spot markets (for more screen shots
click here). Firms with excess computing capacity operators of data centres,
cloud providers, hosting firms put it up for sale. Others, who have a
short-term need for some number-crunching, can bid for it. Enomaly takes a cut
of between 10% and 30% depending on the size of the deal. But there is an
important difference: SpotCloud is what Enomaly calls an opaque market ,
meaning that the firms offering capacity do not have to reveal their identity.
Thus selling computing services for cheap on SpotCloud does not cannibalise
regular offerings.
Technically, the service is also not entirely what one would expect. Enomaly
did not build a big central infrastructure because the bandwidth demands would
have killed us , in the words of Mr Cohen: files of virtual machines are very
large. Instead, the firm works with Google App Engine, itself a cloud-computing
provider, which gives Enomaly access to a decentralised global system. The
buyer s virtual machines files are parked on App Engine before being send to a
seller s servers. Buyers can also define in which country or even city they
want their virtual machines to run.
SpotCloud has been up and running since November in a closed trial and has
already attracted a lot of supply. It often comes from unexpected corners of
the computing universe. For instance, an entertainment company has offered
capacity on 4,000 servers that would otherwise sit unused (probably in a lull
between making animated movies). In other cases, says Mr Reuven, firms offer
the capacity of old servers, which otherwise would be thrown away at some
point.
The big question is whether there is also enough demand. Again, Mr Cohen is
optimistic, and sees many ways in which Enomaly s market place could be used:
getting non-critical computing tasks done quickly and cheaply, testing new
websites and quickly adding computing capacity in certain regions. But he also
warns that SpotCloud is not for those who want long-term computing needs
satisfied with the service-level guaranteed. Instead, it is for those who need
capacity quickly and do not much care if the computing task has to be restarted
if something goes wrong.