Amazon Launches Marketplace for Cloud Capacity

When Amazon Web Services introduced Spot Instances in late 2009, it sparked discussion of cloud computing exchanges in which customers could buy and sell capacity. This week Amazon has launched the Reserved Instance Marketplace, creating a secondary exchange in which AWS users can buy and sell cloud computing capacity that has been reserved for future use. "If you have excess capacity, you can list it on the marketplace and sell it to someone who needs additional capacity," writes Jeff Barr, Senior Web Services Evangelist, on the AWS Blog. The marketplace also allows AWS users to do comparison shopping for instances that may be priced at a discount to Amazon's pricing. In this 3-minute video, Barr and EC2 Senior Manager Dave Ward discuss the new marketplace and how it works.

What about a cloud capacity exchange that allows you to buy and sell capacity across different public clouds? See our coverage of SpotCloud, which was launched by Enomaly and has since been acquired by Virtustream.