To say we’ve had a spectacular launch would be putting it lightly. Since our Valentines Day SpotCloud Launch, we’ve been inundated with interest in the marketplace. Buyers, sellers, investors and media have flocked to us in the thousands from around the world.
As of today we have dozens of active providers online from Hafnarfjörður (that’s in Iceland) to Boston to Brisbane to Hong Kong. There are also in the hundreds of providers who have signed up and are in various stages of preparation and set-up of their SpotCloud environments. We are actively on-boarding new providers as fast as we can. If you haven’t done so yet, go ahead and get started as a provider.
We’re also seeing a lot of interest from the buyer side as well with a ratio of 5:1 buyers to sellers. It’s been great to observe an increasing rate of buyers converting from the initial “tire-kicking” phase to becoming more active users. The market is now open and free to browse. So go ahead and sign up as a buyer.
Some Various SpotCloud Market Updates
Instance Renewals
We just pushed an update to the SpotCloud marketplace that fixes a few bugs, but, most importantly, adds the ability for SpotCloud buyers to renew their instances at the current spot market price. Previously, at the end of the maximum duration, a buyer’s appliance would be automatically terminated (deleted). Now, if a SpotCloud seller enables this feature, a buyer will have the option to keep their instance at the end of the duration and pay the current spot price going forward. More importantly, they can keep their IP address and data. An email is automatically sent to the Buyer when their instance is close to being terminated to provide the option of having it renewed.
As a seller, to enable this feature, you must login to the SpotCloud management interface as a seller at https://spotcloud.appspot.com/provider/pricing and select the check box on each hardware profile labeled "Instance renew allowed"
As a buyer, you’ll see the new option in your instance information or via an email sent to you before termination. We hope to include this in our API in an upcoming release.
New SpotCloud Apppliances
We’ve published several new sample spotcloud Appliance including a OpenVPN appliance and Aflexi CDN appliance. In the next few weeks we will be releasing a built-in App Directory in the SpotCloud market, to enable much easier deployment of SpotCloud Appliances.
Get Featured in our upcoming App Directory
If you have an application that would make a great sample SpotCloud appliance, we’d love to include it in our upcoming App Directory, so please get in touch.
Create your own appliance using the SpotCloud CLI & appliance bundling tool
You can now easily convert an existing VM to the SpotCloud Appliance format using our SpotCloud CLI and Appliance Bundling Tool. This tool also provides an easy command line API access to the SpotCloud marketplace enabling a true hybrid cloud computing experience.
Selected Media Coverage
Economist Magazine - Cloud computing: A market for computing power
“LIKE oil or pork bellies, computing capacity is now a tradeable commodity. February 14th saw the launch of SpotCloud, the world’s first spot market for cloud computing. It works much like other spot markets”.
Eweek Review - SpotCloud Explores the Cloud's Utility Computing Future
“One of the most popular images used to illustrate the concept of cloud computing is the electrical grid. The “cloud” can be tricky to pin down, but everyone is familiar with plugging into a standardized socket and drawing the juice necessary to run many electrical devices from a network of large power plants.”
