Will Cloud Services One Day Be Traded Just Like Stocks and Bonds? 168
Brandon Butler writes "Today, cloud computing resources are bought and sold in a fairly straightforward process: A company needs extra compute capacity, for example, so they contract with a provider who spins up virtual machines for a certain amount of time. But what will that process look like in, say, 2020? If efforts by a handful of companies come to fruition, there could be a lot more wheeling and dealing that goes on behind the scenes. An idea is being floated to package cloud computing resources into blocks that can be bought and sold on a commodity futures trading market. It would be similar to how financial instruments like stocks, bonds and agricultural products like corn and wheat are traded on exchanges by investors. Blocks of cloud computing resources — for example a month's worth of virtual machines, or a year's worth of cloud storage — would be packaged by service providers and sold on a market. In the exchange, investors and traders could buy up these blocks and resell them to end users, or other investors, potentially turning a profit if the value of the resource increases."
Blech (Score:4, Informative)
What the hell would be the point of... any of that.
I have a hard enough time understanding why anything below the 1st sale market works, but what practical purpose does this serve.
Just sounds like yet another way for people to skim money off something without actually providing anything valuable. The benefits to the consumer given in the article seem pretty damn thin.
Also does the cost of computing really go up that often? When was the last time your VPS provider increased the cost of what you were paying for?
And finally, this all assumes providers are all interchangeable. I don’t see any motivation for that to happen. Providers want to build lock-in (or brand loyalty) like any other industry, which they do by offering provider specific tools and features.
I don’t consider myself a hippy, or a communist, but the more I see stuff like this, the more I think we really need to re-think the whole money concept. It seems to have outgrown it’s use as an abstract bartering tool and driven a massive amount of human potential into pointless and non-beneficial activities.
Re:In other words... (Score:4, Informative)
Pretty much what I was thinking.
Then we'll have an entire market of speculators who define the price for us because they bought it six months ago.
Stupid idea.
Memories... (Score:5, Informative)
I remember a bunch of douchebags who managed to convince non-technical business leaders that bandwidth could be traded like this. They set up a whole trading market, pumped a bunch of money through it...I even worked for someone who managed to get us in to do a vulnerability assessment of their whole operation.
After we were done, the upper management of this company (the douchebags with the trading capability) came in, and shut down the meeting where we presented our findings...after which, they sacked the IT people who brought us in. Why, you ask? Because the whole thing was a sham, and the upper management was afraid it would get found out. The douchebags were Enron.
This sounds very similar to me.
Re:Blech (Score:4, Informative)
Rich douchebag kids of rich douchebags NEED JOBS!