Trading compute
The notion that compute resources might be bought and sold on the open market as a commodity has been around for a while. Some love the idea, and can't believe it hasn't happened yet. Others point to a heap of very real challenges, or get hung up on whether or not CPU cycles are a standardised commodity "like a banana." Hands up, anyone who has ever seen two bananas that are identical. Being identical really isn't the point. Being measurable might be.
There have been previous attempts to resell/ offload excess capacity. Amazon's reserved instances, for example, or Reuven Cohen's SpotCloud. But a full-blown exchange would be a very different beast.
Here in Europe, Deutsche Börse and Zimory were first out of the gate with their Cloud Exchange.
And today, the one that many of us have been waiting for finally saw the light of day; 6fusion and Chicago exchange the CME Group publicly committed to 'explore the development of an IaaS exchange."
Some of these ideas go back a long way. James Mitchell at Strategic Blue, for one, has been applying his previous work in investment banking to this space for several years. The 6fusion team were already moving in this direction when I did some work for GigaOM last year, underwritten by them. Metering, measurement, and a shared understanding of the units of measure will be key here.
These exchanges, I suspect, begin life trading excess compute capacity to customers with low priority compute jobs; I want to process one million images over the next week, simply shop around and put them in the cheapest location. The potential grows as requirements become more complex, and as this increasingly becomes a financial conversation rather than a technological one. Just as airlines hedge fuel costs years into the future, why couldn't a big enterprise do the same for their compute requirements? All of them; the on-premise and the cloud based.
That's when it gets interesting... but we've got a way to go before we reach that point. Today's announcement is another step along the path.
