Reuven Cohen compares Enomaly’s new Spotcloud service to Google Adwords and Google AdSense.
“Google built AdWords and Adsense into a clearinghouse for unused ad space,” said Cohen, founder of Enomaly and the Spotcloud service. “This is a clearing house for unused computing.”
In essence, Spotcloud is a marketplace that leverages supply and demand in the market to determine the price of the service. This is comparable to a spot market, where buyers and sellers make deals through an intermediary.
The Spotcloud service is primarily designed for edge based capacity. Buyers can choose from regional or national providers. Sellers offer capacity on a transient basis, meaning it is available for a defined period of time. The minimum contract is one day with the longest duration possible being 30 days.
Sellers that want to use the service have two options. They may use a free version of the Enomaly virtual machine technology to install on the cluster of machines that have the excess capacity . Alternatively, they can access the Enomaly API to offer capacity.
Spotcloud is built on Google App Engine. Cohen said he and his crew are a Python shop. Plus, for a service like Spotcloud, bandwidth is the issue more than anything else.
Spotcloud shows that any data center can serve as a cloud service. It reminds us of Data Center Map, which we looked at last week.
For now, the services available through Spotcloud are not renewable which means that customers will use Spotcloud on an ad-hoc basis. But the difference here is it shows that data centers and co-location facilities do not have to be left out. They can offer a service that can help make the most of what they have and offer it to a marketplace with global reach.
