
EC2 Reserved Instance Marketplace - jeffbarr
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/09/amazon-ec2-reserved-instance-marketplace.html
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e-dard
I based my PhD thesis on the idea of trading computational cloud (or any,
really) resources. I went a little further though, and looked at how to design
algorithms for the actual marketplaces, which allowed them to optimise how
they competed with other marketplaces. A bit like London Stock Exchange
competing with the New York Stock Exchange.

While my research was a little blue sky (what isn't) I do think that
electronic trading of computation resources is the future, and I think Amazon
are ahead of the game in this respect.

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mryan
Would you be willing to share some links to your research? I find this area
fascinating, and also believe this is going to be a big market in future.

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julien_c
Apparently
[http://www.eddrobinson.net/papers/robinson_2011_phd_disserta...](http://www.eddrobinson.net/papers/robinson_2011_phd_dissertation.pdf)

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Yrlec
I wish they would allow sellers to receive the funds as AWS-credits as well.
Creating a US bank account just for this will be too much of a hassle for many
non-US companies.

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cperciva
Not to mention that if your bank has a fee for receiving wire payments,
selling micro instances is pretty much pointless.

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Udo
It's important to note this only works if you're a business with an American
bank account. Everyone else can't sell EC2 instances there.

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davidjgraph
As I just discovered, would have been nice to unload a couple of instances.
Don't hold your breath waiting for this to change, the level of interest for
non-US DevPay support over the years has been huge, but it's just sat on some
todo list somewhere.

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eli
I agree that that stinks, but international payments are _really hard_ to get
right.

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gojomo
This is so 'Amazon'. (There's a little hint of Enron, too... but the shard of
Enron that made economic sense, markets for expiring capacity.)

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waterlesscloud
The frightening part about Enron is how much of it made sense, in a theory
kinda way.

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jyap
It's late so maybe I'm missing something but is there a way to make money out
of this for sellers and turn a profit? Not just recoup some costs of a
reserved instance(s) they no longer need?

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nkohari
Probably not -- the 12% fee would severely limit the margin if you tried to
trade them.

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sum1randum
We made the mistake of buying a ton of reserved instances up front which we
have been stuck with because we moved on to a different instance with the high
IO. We have been complaining to them about the need for a RI secondary market
at all the AWS events we could attend

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tedchs
Hi sum1randum,

Have you tried engaging the AWS customer service team on this? AWS has a
public face that looks 100% robotic and automated, but I assure you there are
AMAZING support & engineering teams behind the scenes who have a strong vested
interest to make sure customers are successful using AWS.

IMHO, it might be worth a shot to send them a ticket that basically says, we
bought RI's for the instance type we needed at the time, but now you guys
released the new High IO type, and for us to be successful we really need to
upgrade these RI's. So, the ideal outcome is you go buy your new reservations
and then they give a prorated credit for the rest of your RI term on the old
ones. I would imagine they might still steer you to the RI marketplace now but
it's worth a shot if you can be persuasive enough.

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pbiggar
I'm starting to think Amazon is cynically exploiting the edge cases of its
pricing to make a large portion of its money.

This looked great at the start, but the details really make this shitty. You
need to sign up as a seller and all the hassle it entails (I'd be happy with
AWS credits, I'm just going to spend them on another instance), they charge
12% and then they _also_ round down to the nearest month.

In fact, a large portion of Amazon's business model seems to be selling the
same thing multiple times. We still waste a lot of money because EC2 insists
on charging for a full hour no matter what (eg even if the instance didn't
even start!), and it seems a pretty scummy way of making a lot of extra
margins. And now they're doing the same thing here.

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ghshephard
Could Amazon be theoretically more efficient - sure. In fact, I wouldn't be
surprised, if over time, the time requirement for owning (30 days) and the
round off period (To the month, rounded down) and the fee (12%) is rounded
down - but, this is a new service that did not exist before - so from that
perspective, it's great. All the things that you used to be able to do (lend
someone your EC2 instance) still exists.

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trustfundbaby
It just seems like a long winded way to avoid just charging at shorter
intervals for reserved instances.

I guess the margins on these things are really thin but I don't see why, they
can't charge monthly or let you upgrade a reserved instance (this I find
particularly silly)

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JeffJenkins
I spoke to someone in Amazon's NYC event earlier this year, and they said the
reservations are used to help guide their hardware purchases. Since the
hardware will be around for quite a while, they require longer terms (for now,
anyway)

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Yrlec
Really cool! New startup idea: create a trading algorithm that acts as a
market maker of reserved instances. You should probably be able to price the
reserved instances pretty much like bonds, if you compare it to the on-demand
instances. You lock your money for a while but you get some yield in return.

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BadassFractal
It's already being done by a startup I know, I think they might still be in
stealth though.

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somic
Until this announcement, trading (buying and selling) of any EC2 entity was
theoretically impossible.

Many companies claim to be working on things like marketplaces etc, but unless
you can sell (buying is always trivial) and further unless you can sell to not
just AWS but to a pool of other users, it ain't no marketplace.

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juzfoo
Looking at the pricing on the amazon site here:
<http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/#lightUtilizationRILinux>

does it mean Small (Default) linux server only cost $69 for a whole year?
likewise $138 for a medium instance for whole year?

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ashayh
I'm wondering about this too. Or is is 69+ regular hourly charges?

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jweather
$69 is the upfront fee for a 1-year "light utilization", you pay hourly on top
of that at $0.039/hour. Note this is half of the $0.080/hour normal price
(non-reserved). If you wanted a dedicated (100% utilization) reserved small
Linux instance, it would be $195 setup and $11.71/month (total $335/year) vs.
non-reserved at $58.56/month (total $702.72/year). Note that the upfront fee
is paid each time you renew a term, it's not really a "one-time" fee like with
dedicated servers.

Edit: source: <http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html>

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snorkel
Great new business plans: Instance squatting. Instance futures trading.
Instance futures trading analysts ...

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EwanToo
Absolutely fantastic idea.

I assume people have been doing this on a somewhat grey market up until now,
so it's great that is now an approved system.

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hongyih
This is great

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TimPietrusky
Awesome!

