Much of the focus on cloud computing has been on the technology, who’s offering it, and who’s using it. But any time you look at new ways of doing business, you eventually get back to the perennial questions of how the business model works and what pricing will be. Amazon’s (AMZN) announcement of spot pricing for EC2 resources is actually a critical stage in the development of cloud computing overall, offering an important institutional facility as well as a challenge that will start to face IT departments and vendors alike.
http://industry.bnet.com/technology/10004394/amazon-spot-market-critical-step-for-cloud-computing/
With Spot Instances, customers bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long as their bid exceeds the current Spot Price. The Spot Price changes periodically based on supply and demand, and customers whose bids exceed it gain access to the available Spot Instances.
Much of the focus on cloud computing has been on the technology, who’s offering it, and who’s using it. But any time you look at new ways of doing business, you eventually get back to the perennial questions of how the business model works and what pricing will be. Amazon’s (AMZN) announcement of spot pricing for EC2 resources is actually a critical stage in the development of cloud computing overall, offering an important institutional facility as well as a challenge that will start to face IT departments and vendors alike.
http://industry.bnet.com/technology/10004394/amazon-spot-market-critical-step-for-cloud-computing/
With Spot Instances, customers bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long as their bid exceeds the current Spot Price. The Spot Price changes periodically based on supply and demand, and customers whose bids exceed it gain access to the available Spot Instances.