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Will Cloud Services One Day Be Traded Just Like Stocks and Bonds?

Posted by timothy on from the too-compute-intensive-to-fail dept.

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."

2 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. In other words... by sconeu · · 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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  2. Memories... by Shoten · · 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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