Moving Towards A True Utility…

Amazon has just announced ‘Spot Instances‘ in their cloud. In essence, you can set a price for the compute power you need and when the cloud has the spare capacity your job will run – of course, if there isn’t the capacity, or someone else has bid a higher price you run the risk of it not happening.

This is not dissimilar to some of the grid computing ideas (and practices) from a decade ago – and it makes a lot of sense for Amazon to start to offer it. They get to use more of their IT estate, more of the time, and they also get more customers, who would then be more likely to use them rather than  different service for other jobs that need a compute farm.

One issue I see arising with this (and it’s pretty much the same as for all cloud environments) is security and auditing. It is tough enough to get the appropriate information from cloud vendors to satisfy auditors on security and data handling, without then moving to instances which can chop and change depending on market needs. Perhaps this is why they Amazon say it is ideal for number crunching apps, rather than anything else…

Spot Instances are taking us towards a real compute utility, where price and flexibility rule. Variable pricing based on when you get to use the resources will be a potential boon for smaller customers who, for now, cannot afford the fixed term pricing. It will be interesting to see what the other cloud service providers respond with.

Guy Bunker

December 15, 2009 | Filed Under Cloud computing 

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