Cloudspace is becoming a commodity that can be bought and sold on the “spot market.” That’s more true than ever with the introduction of real time auctions for “instances” in Amazon.com’s Elastic Cloud 2 (EC2). The details of the “beta” version of “Spot Instances” are published here.

The ideal proof points, as listed in the post, include “image and video processing, conversion and rendering; scientific research data processing; or financial modeling and analysis. However, my voice and mobile-oriented mind spins sees a mechanism for rate arbitrage when running a videoconference or Webcast; a source of call processing and media processing resources for “busy hour” in a customer care/collaboration session or other instances that are left to the imagination of the new generation of real-time, rich phone application developers.

The good news is that spot prices are often less than published rates. They are, in essence, loss leaders and ways for Amazon.com to make incremental revenue on unused capacity. The caveat is that, by design, “If you’re running Spot Instances and your maximum price no longer meets or exceeds the current Spot Price, your instances will be terminated.” So it isn’t the rock-solid, persistent connection that a company would want to make part of its critical path telephony.

This is a very promising development in the world of Recombinant Communications. Solutions providers and application developers have one more place to shop for affordable storage, computing, database management and queuing resources at the lowest price possible. It is an evolutionary step toward that will put pressure on alternative hosted service providers to become more fluid in how they price and offer resources on demand.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Recombinant Telephony, Amazon Web Services