[ Cloud Computing ] Compute surface as a traded commodity?

Bruce wrote:
>Will the "Cloud" ever become a pool of hosting providers who pitch their prices, SLA's and storage cost so customers will come to their "cloud" for services?

I foresee a time into the future where the compute surface is virtualized and standardized enough that hosting contracts can be traded as a commodity on a market, rather than the RFP type process we have today.

Such agreement would allow business to place a deal on an exchange much like FX today and get bids to run based on some parameters. IT hosters would price the deal with a spread in the same way as a currency trade today, the deal done in a matter of seconds and hosted for the duration of a contract window.

If virtualization vendors deliver on their hybrid end-vision, this could be a reality of packaging workloads with SLA manifests and using internet vMotion-type tools to migrate. It would fundamentally change the way we write software frameworks and applications themselves to be more self contained and highly standardized to achieve the best 'tradability'.

Interoperability via standards between VM platforms, portability of data, code business logic and processes are all key to how we build out the Cloud.

Such openness may be a far extreme view, but would you want the opposite view of the world where switching costs and lock-in are extremely constraining and we are forever stuck in a platform cycle of distribute-and-consolidate?


Simon Plant
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