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."
In other words... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's take something useful, and let the parasites make money off of our work...
Just like the stock market.
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Yeah, someone said "There aren't enough middle men!" and is trying hard to figure out how they can keep us from just getting the services directly like we can now.
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Yeah, someone said "There aren't enough middle men!" and is trying hard to figure out how they can keep us from just getting the services directly like we can now.
If what's going on with Tesla Motors is any indicator... they'll just make it functionally, or actually, illegal, while screaming as loud as they can it's in the consumer's best interests. Heh. Like a company has ever said that in the history of all of humanity and it turned out it that they didn't have ulterior motives. :3
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It is not at all clear what the heck you're going on about Tesla Motors. Do you mean the dealers who are complaining that some of their advertising is misleading? If you look at the complaint, you'll notice 2 things: that the advertising is actually misleading in the way accused, and that it is a rather small complaint.
Tesla has a waiting list, and are making money. They're neither being obstructed by regulation, or given an advantage by it. The reason that they haven't ramped up production yet is that they
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Ah, I see. It is to be expected that a few states will have local politicians that protect the old money as long as they can. In Texas it is gaining them a lot of publicity, and they've sold ~ 1000 to Texans so far. But even if you add Colorado, the exception proves the rule. 2 States? That means States aren't generally passing laws that interfere with consumer choice. The mediocrity of the consumers is what leads to the mediocrity of offerings.
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It would work, too, if the value of these services was not in a perpetual downward spiral. In order to make this happen, you would need some compelling reason this was a sensible investment. Honestly, while I think the idea is pretty cool... I'm just not seeing how it could possibly work. Maybe if you had a whole bevy of similar or inter-related services offered by commodity providers?
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I'm a believer in eliminating the buying and selling of "stock" amongst investors. It's gotten so abstract and convoluted that it serves only to take money off the top of others work as you said.
I'll admit I haven't really thought this through, but I envision a system where buy into a company in the hopes that they do well, and make your profit when they do (or take the loss when they don't).
All this second sale stuff is artificial and I think needs to go, people are buying things whos only purpose (barring
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a lot of funds have rules where they are only allowed to hold stocks of certain company. it could be size, or sector or growth rate or whatever. if a company grows or does something to violate the fund's rules then the stock has to be sold. same with buying.
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I envision a system where buy into a company in the hopes that they do well, and make your profit when they do (or take the loss when they don't).
This pretty well describes the stock market. I buy a piece of the company, and if they make profits they give dividends (or the price increases and I can sell some or all of my stock to make money as well).
people are buying things whos only purpose (barring dividends) is resale for the same purpose.
I'm unsure how this is different from the system you envisioned in the previous quote?
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At the IPO level it makes sense to me, because you are essentially providing them funding.
After that, you are buying from another investor. And some day, another investor is buying from you. The money at this point is just bouncing around from investor to investor.
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After that, you are buying from another investor. And some day, another investor is buying from you. The money at this point is just bouncing around from investor to investor.
Most normal stocks pay dividends regularly.
Tech stocks mostly aren't normal, for various reasons that come down to "lawful tax fiddle"; as a holder of a tech stock you're having to hope that the withholding of the dividend leads to a greater increase in value than you'd get from having the dividend payed out. Sometimes that works.
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Re: In other words... (Score:2)
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No, that's how the stock market used to work.
Now people expect to buy a stock, and have it grow linearly so they can sell it.
The stock market has become so horrible separated from fundamentals as to make it unrelated to the performance of the company. A company can have a good quarter but the stock goes
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It used to be you bought a stock, and held onto it. If they were profitable they might pay dividends. Over time, the stock could go up.
Um, this is still how it works. I have several stocks that I have held for a long time, I have no plans to sell them, and they pay me a steady stream of dividends from their profits. The stocks have slowly risen over the years.
Now you could buy and sell your stocks every few minutes/hours/days hoping to make a buck, but the 'market' itself doesn't require you to do this. It is an individual investor's choice...
Re: In other words... (Score:2)
Re: In other words... (Score:2)
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In my model of ownership, the stock itself has no actual value (because you can't sell it).
I do accept that there are a tonne of holes in this approach. Why would a company in that situation even declare any profit vice just dumping it all into internal stuff, etc. It's more of a really high level view of how I wished it worked, that is, the money going directly to someone who is going to be doing something with it, rather than just bouncing around between other investors.
The original idea of a large number
Re:In other words... (Score:5, Insightful)
In my model of ownership, the stock itself has no actual value (because you can't sell it).
In your model of ownership, buying into a company, even a successful one, would be significant risk—you wouldn't be able to break even for decades, much less make a profit. Moreover, you would have to buy in when the company is formed, at which point the ownership is set in stone. We would be reduced to companies privately owned by a small number of partners; changing the set of partners or the division of ownership would require dissolving the company and starting anew. To raise money the partners would have to take out loans rather than selling shares. I really don't see any of that as an improvement over the current system.
It's more of a really high level view of how I wished it worked, that is, the money going directly to someone who is going to be doing something with it, rather than just bouncing around between other investors.
That's what happens when you buy shares at an IPO or (dilutive) follow-on offering. The money goes directly to the company, and you get a small measure of ownership in exchange. That only works if the shares are worth something after they're sold, though. No one would hand over money to the company without expecting to get something of value in return, which pretty much depends on being able to sell the shares eventually (even if all the actual profits come from dividends).
Re:In other words... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you have no right to sell what's yours, you don't own it at all.
Re: In other words... (Score:2)
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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.
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As long as these futures are traded in real markets, with real market rules, no one will be cornering the market. All the really dirty tricks in markets are 100+ years old, and real commodities markets have structural protections against them.
OTOH, the scenario you describe can be a good one, if no one's cornering the market. A few years back, oil futures were so much higher than spot (immediate delivery) prices that speculators were buying oil, storing in in tankers that just sailed around, for delivery
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The only thing markets did in this case was destroy demand, as people who would otherwise have been able to afford to buy their share of oil were unable
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Then we'll have an entire market of speculators who define the price for us because they bought it six months ago.
More like 6 microseconds ago.
Re: In other words... (Score:2)
Re: In other words... (Score:2)
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Unless someone commits fraud, I don't see how connecting buyers with sellers is parasitism. It's a useful service, and like other useful services it is worth paying for.
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Buyers are already connected with sellers. The only benefit this could possibly bring is allowing the cloud services providers to sell longer term contracts to the investors who would then take the risk of parceling them out to smaller time operators who don't want to finance a long term contract on their own. This sector is already quite well serviced by Amazon and other operators, so there is really no need for this "exchange" to ever realise.
Re: In other words... (Score:2)
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Thank you for the informative response.
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It becomes parasitism when you disallow the direct buying and selling of these services. (either through legal or practical means)
The model works perfectly fine as is. These people are proposing we add more layers to the equation, so they can find a spot to hide and take their 5% off the top for the service of adding more layers.
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That's already happening. That's a valuable service, and I'm perfectly comfortable paying for those services.
These guys are proposing we obfuscate the method, and inject themselves as middle-men who help navigate the obfuscated methods. Instead of going to Amazon.com and buying some amount of cloud computing ... I would go to "Reseller.com" and pay them to go get me the same amount of cloud computing, which costs the Amazon price plus a few "service fees".
And on it's own ... that could be useful. I don't
Re: In other words... (Score:2)
If so, don't use them. or the grocery store, gas.. (Score:5, Insightful)
If aggregators, dealers, and other "middle men" don't offer you anything you want, don't use them. Simple.
Note that the grocery store, gas station, and just about every other business you use is a middle man. If the grocery store doesn't offer you any advantage over ordering items shipped directly from manufacturers and producers, you can make that choice. Sometimes, I order things direct. Most of the time, it's more convenient and cheaper to go through an aggregator / retailer like Walmart.
If you want some of the services of a middle man but not all, you have that choice too. Sam's Club and other warehouse stores sell cases at low prices, just like buying direct. Internet distributors are another in-between option. Yet, most of the time we prefer the services of a middle man, a retailer.
More on topic, I have bought, and continue to buy data services through a middle man. The backbone providers sell 10Gb connections. They aren't interested in the 50Mbps I want to buy. My retailer IS very interested in my 50Mbps account and they work hard to keep me happy. If there's a problem with one of the backbones, they have the expertise and the pull to get it fixed.
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I had this discussion with someone else a few days ago. The thing that makes "middle-men" an undesireable thing is the value they bring to the table. Walmart brings me a lot of value, I can go to their store and buy the produce of several different farms, and several manufacturing plants. Getting everything I get from Walmart would require me to travel all over the country, so I'm quite happy to pay Walmart for their service.
Putting cloud services on an exchange doesn't create value. Currently I go to Amazo
Re: If so, don't use them. or the grocery store, g (Score:2)
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What I think might happen is that regulations might be put in place to prevent cloud services providers from selling directly to their customers, as is currently the case with car dealerships. I believe that would be an unlikely scenario, so the more probably outcome is for the people who set up the exchanges to quickly go broke.
Re: If so, don't use them. or the grocery store, (Score:2)
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Many people think otherwise? One dude with a blog thinks otherwise.
What is the benefit to consumers of this?
Re: If so, don't use them. or the grocery store, (Score:2)
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My retailer IS very interested in my 50Mbps account and they work hard to keep me happy.
I believed everything you said up until that point.
many forms are available, your choice (Score:3)
What do you mean "of you don't want to participate in culture in it's exact form as it exists right now"?
Right now, you can buy from a boutique retailer who buys from a distributor, you can buy direct from the manufacturer, or many choices in between.
I bought my last pair of glasses from 39dollarglasses.com. They are the same glasses the retailer in the mall will sell me for $160. The differences include - the retailer will measure the distance between my eyes for me, help me find a pair that looks nice
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Unless someone commits fraud, I don't see how connecting buyers with sellers is parasitism. It's a useful service, and like other useful services it is worth paying for.
There is no need for middlemen, therefore it is not a useful service. Investment markets are like politically connected men putting up a tollbooth at the end of your driveway and saying that connecting you to the road is a useful service, and like other useful services it is worth paying for.
Let's say I have a computing job I want to complete some time in the next couple of years. I'm not especially concerned about when it's done but I want it done for below a certain price. With a futures market, I could look for a good time of year when prices are low and lock that in now, establishing a contract that the counterparty will either provide the service at that time or pay whatever it costs to find a provider that can.
The benefit to providers is that they can sell anticipated capacity in advance
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Except you've got things completely backwards, this would ELIMINATE a lot of the middle-men.
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If cloud services became a commodity, you wouldn't need to be b
Re: In other words... (Score:2)
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The stock market, regardless of if you like it or not, at least does have some usefulness in valuing and trading in uncertainty. The same as commodities.
Cloud services, OTOH, have a 100% predictable supply, that can be increased or decreased for very predictable costs/savings. So there is none of the value added by a middleman in commodities. It seems obvious that adding middlemen where there is neither uncertainty nor even delivery logistics, is just going to make those offerings cost more for the same thi
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Let's take something useful, and let the parasites make money off of our work...
Just like the stock market.
Just like a federal reserve note, something for nothing, until you try to pay for it.
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.
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The same point of allowing Goldman Sachs to ``invest'' in wheat futures:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/node/775651 [foreignpolicy.com]
It's obscene that the laws limiting participation in futures commodities were lifted --- that status quo needs to be restored ASAP.
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Given that I have a fair idea of how the money process works, I can see without RTFA how this could work.
Say you are in charge of a large enterprise project that will need a large amount of computing horsepower. You don't know when you will have these resources available to complete the project - but you know you need to hold the Virtual cycles in reserve because of budget and other reasons that occur with Layer 8 issues. So, you buy a large block of time - but you can't use that virtual processing time yet
Re:Blech (Score:4, Informative)
Rich douchebag kids of rich douchebags NEED JOBS!
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Initially, the commodities market emerged from the farmer's need to secure part of their income against calamities. They would sell their future crop at a relatively low price to an investor, but who would pay them up front for it. They would thus share some of the risk involved, but they would also give up some of the profits. So, things like bad quality produce due to bad weather or low market prices due to overproduction and low demand are no longer destroying the lives of farmers. This system also incre
Re: Blech (Score:2)
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I'm no expert, but the futures price will always be higher than the amount paid to the farmer. Otherwise, there would be no reason to trade the contract in the futures exchange in the first place. The "increased demand" is a falsehood created in the trading pit (and nowadays in the computer network). There will be some price fluctuations as contracts change hands, some will make money, some will lose money, but the ultimate looser is the farmer (that gets nothing) and the end-consumer (that pays everything)
Re: Blech (Score:2)
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Couple of points:
Providers don't necessarily have to be interchangeable - I think that's a misconception with this idea. Consumers will just use resources from whatever providers they buy the commodity from. They could choose to only buy AWS clouds, for exmaple, from this marketplace Federation would be ideal, but it's not a requirement for this to work.
Here are some pros and cons of the broader plan though:
Pros:
Gives consumers a market on which to shop for cloud products in an apples-to-apples comparison
But only if the cloud providers *want* an apples-to-apples comparison. I suspect, that just like cellular provides, they will obfuscate their pricing so much so as to make it impossible for a simple comparison. Additionally, they'll add features that other competitors don't have - look at Amazon AWS, they have dozens of cloud products and services with rich API's. If you use those tools, you're probably not going to find them at Google Compute Engine or the Rackspace Cloud.
Fail (Score:5, Insightful)
In the exchange, investors and traders could buy up these blocks
Step 1. Get most of the major internet websites and businesses onto cloud architecture.
Step 2. Add middlemen between cloud providers and users who can arbitrarily increase the price of computational resources once they're locked in.
Step 3. Profit!
A taxpayer funded government Cloud Bailout . . . (Score:3)
. . . just what life is missing right now . . .
"if the value of the resource increases" (Score:4, Insightful)
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Unlike most other commodities that businesses seek to control and restrict the supply thereof (such as stocks), processing power is expected to keep going up per Moore's Law for several years yet. Anyone investing now is not going to make money.
You know, they said the same thing about IPv4. Who'd ever pay to have an address? And they said the same thing about DNS. Well, here's the thing you don't get: Artificial scarcity. Why would you want to add more product to the market, crashing your margins, when you can keep it high and rake in the dough? It's not like just anyone can go and cloud it up. And you're forgetting the lessons of OPEC -- If you control production, you control the price. And demand naturally tends upwards because so does the popul
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cloud services are not a commodity (Score:5, Insightful)
wheat, corn and other commodities are called commodities because corn is mostly corn no matter which farm you buy it from. food processors buy from lots of suppliers and mix it all together.
and commodities are mostly traded for price protection and risk reasons. if you invest say $1000 per acre to grow corn you want to be fairly sure that you can sell it for more than that when its ready to sell. that's what the commodity markets do, they match buyers and sellers who want to lock in their prices before the commodity is delivered to reduce risk. the speculators are a tiny percentage of the market
cloud services are not a commodity. amazon's cloud is different from salesforce which is different from google's cloud which is different from ADP
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That's the first thing that came to mind when I RTFS. This is just stupid.
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I can't see how cloud services ever could be made fungible on a large scale unless providers shared data centers.
A terabyte of storage on a data center close to me network-wise can be far more valuable than a chunk sitting on the wrong end of a 28.8 in Elbonia.
Then there are SLA models. A terabyte of storage stored on a spanned array on a bunch of USB drives is less valuable to one on a multi-path EMC VNX with a tier 1 (SSD) backend, replicating to another site in real time.
Of course, there is security. A
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"Just" get an API and some SLAs standardised, and it's fungible.
You don't care whether it's hosted in Elbonia or next door. You don't care how it's stored. You care about measurable things like transfer speed and disaster recovery performance.
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Fine. Add that to the criteria.
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I find it pretty easy to imagine fungible cloud services. Define some standard APIs. Define some standard measurements of quality/quantity. Done.
For corn it's more complicated than "corn is mostly corn no matter which farm you buy it from" - there are standards for grades.
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Came-on. We can't even compare computers, what makes you think one can compare computers rented on different locations, with different network and power connections, different support teams, different government oversight, and different sets of policies?
Re: cloud services are not a commodity (Score:2)
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You can compare how they'll perform a specific application, or, more realistic, you can choose by price, uptime and customer service from the set of good enough (again, for your specific application) candidates.
Anyway, I think most people choose based on what ad they see first, or what side their coin felt on.
Re: cloud services are not a commodity (Score:2)
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Well, ok, you can trade something if you specify the goods by datacenter and cloud provider (and sometimes computer type). But what you are trading isn't a comodity, as there is only one supplier.
Re: cloud services are not a commodity (Score:2)
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.
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The douchebags were Enron.
Sadly, the douchbags end up making money in the deal . . . and everyone else has to pay to clean up the mess that they have created.
Already here, I think (Score:2)
There are tons of companies reselling Amazon and other webservices, and they make good money by adding value like preconfigured images and other services like backup software that backs up to S3. I don't see why this is news now.
Oh wait, I get it, this guy wants to make good money without adding any value at all. Good luck with that, if he tries to corner the market in AMZN.S3 "stock" (capacity), Amazon's shareholders would happily vote for issuing more "stock" by buying additional capacity, and profiting
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Unlike stock, [which have intrinsic value,] there's no intrinsic value [in storage capacity] to be cheapened by issuing more capacity.
Is this really what you were trying to say?
Commodity, not stocks (Score:2)
Cloud computing is a commodity, not a stock or bond. And the answer is yes.
The main obstacle is the lack of a common standard for cloud resources. It's only a commodity if it's interchangeable: wheat is wheat no matter where it's grown, but AWS and App Engine are very different things.
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Thus it's not a commodity, and your first paragraph is false.
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Fine. Cloud computing *will be* a commodity. *eyeroll*
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Well, maybe once we discover some application independent way to measure it. But that's a deep (if possible at all) mathematical breakthrough separating us from the comoditization of computing.
It's a fine concept to put on sci-fy works, just like faster than light travel, or inverting the second law of thermodynamics. It's not something you put in a business plan.
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So its more like a collateralized debt obligation in an unregulated market. Like what we had before 2007. Nobody knows what they are buying, because everything is unique. And yet someone creates a market (because financial institutions have to 'mark to market') which sets a phony price on a cloud service contract.
And when some fly-by-night provider goes tits up or gets hacked, the market will collapse, because nobody knows who is holding the risk. And the banks will scream. Because cloud service contracts
Why would anyone pay extra for cloud services? (Score:2)
Not going to happen (Score:2)
Enron (remember Enron?) tried to do this for network bandwidth. Didn't work.
A futures market requires a standardized, fungible product, like oil or electric power. This is hard when the manufacturer or service provider controls the product definition. Rarely has there been a successful futures market in a manufactured good or service.
It's been tried. There's a futures market in cold-rolled steel sheet. But there's no futures market in cars or office space or air travel. Some airlines have sold options
Are "cloud computing" resources fungible now? (Score:2)
Are they? I mean, if the price today to run my workloads on Service A is $25 and on Service B $20, is there enough compatibility and flexibility to simply "vmotion" my workloads to whoever has the best deal that day? The same thing could apply to storage.
My basic understanding is "no" -- an Amazon VM instance isn't directly portable to Rackspace or some other service and the connectivity isn't necessarily fast enough to move the associated storage around that easily, either.
But will it get that way in the
Why would the value go up or down? (Score:2)
Permutation City (Score:2)
Version problems and vendor incentives (Score:2)
One of the problems that has to be solved is the version-combo problem.
For example, a given project may require version 1 of the database, version 1.5 of the language, version 2 of the OS, version 3 of the middle-ware, version 3.5 of Apache, etc etc etc.
Most cloud services don't support enough versions to handle specific matches, making swapping vendors difficult. You have to change versions to move your project, which often creates bugs and reprogramming effort when you move.
Also, there is no incentive for
I've heard this before (Score:2)
One if Enron's hare-brained schemes was to develop a market in bandwidth [internetnews.com]. It was one of the things that steered me away from investing in what was then the hottest stock in the market
Wrong. (Score:2)
Computing resource isn't like money.
You can't use it when ever you please. If everyone wanted to use all their "compute blocks" at the same time, a provider could grind to a halt. They have finite resources. If they never allocated more than they could provide at once, they would never be fully utilised since the "cloud traders" would be holding on to some to trade.
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But it is like coal -- or it can be made to be like coal.
You can't buy as much coal as you like at an arbitrary point in time - because there's only so much coal already mined, and it takes time and money to mine more.
If lots of people want coal at the same time, the price goes up. If you buy coal at a time when few other people want it, it will be cheaper.
Make computing resource fungible enough - by standardising the API and the measurements of quality/quantity, and you can certainly treat computing resour
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It's the opposite of coal though. Coal has limits on how much you can buy, because it is a physical thing that requires mining and processing. You can burn as much of it as you like, when ever you like once you've bought and transported it.
Computing resource is the opposite, the bottle neck comes when you want to use it. If everyone used theirs at the same time, everyone would suffer, things would take longer and the value would decrease. So higher demand = lower price. Or pay for "premium" compute blocks a
High Frequency Traders... (Score:2)
So, you have a FHT server farm, right in the exchange, because if you are across the street someone will take your lunch money (well technically your chance to steal someone else's lunch money). But because of the antiquated nature of the markets, they close down for two thirds of the day... Can't use those same servers to game the Nikkei - you have to be right on top of that too. So now you have a world wide set of servers which are 60% idle... Maybe you could sell that time.
But you're someone who th
short answer.... no (Score:2)
Security and reliability (Score:2)
Two questions: Are we going to wind up developing the equivalent of a "USDA Certified Grade A Cycles" sticker? And what is the cloud computing equivalent of Taco Bell "meat"?
I feel like commoditization might provide a level of anonymity to allow both a low grade of service (faking processing with either less accurate processing or known-faulty equipment) and a security risk (While a collection of cloud services are mining your customer data for you, how many are copying it off for later perusal?)
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> is an hour on a Azure VM worth the same as an hour on a Amazon Web Services VM?
The Holy Market Forces will decide.
Until someone figures out how to game the system.
Remember Enron?
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Sadly, I ran out of mod points a few hours ago.
+1 insightful