Make cloud providers outprice each other

Kevin Simper
2 min readSep 25, 2016

What if you could switch all your computation to different cloud providers based on criteria you had defined? If one cloud provider could provide super cheap computation because there is an under capacity they want to be filled, you could simply move all your containers to that provider? That is an actual possibility nowadays because our applications are much easier to move.
But why should you not be able to move clouds that easy? It is not like your car is locked into a certain kind of gasoline or your electric car can only get electricity from Tesla. Imagine what that would do if we could move all our apps in seconds because one cloud provider could provide it cheaper the next minute. It would benefit us all, cloud providers would not have as much under capacity, as they live price every server based on the demand and customers can get much cheaper computation as they can define who much a task is worth to them!

Here are the two factors that can influence the price:

  • Time of the day (how busy are the servers in general)
    Everywhere in the world where it is night, servers are generally underutilized
  • How much the sun shines (if the sun shines a lot, solar panels produces more power, which means cheaper electricity and therefore cheaper computation)

There is a huge problem with that you can’t in general store wind power electricity (Denmark has that) and we can’t find anybody that wants to buy it. That is the reason why Apple build a huge data center here: https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/02/23Apple-to-Invest-1-7-Billion-in-New-European-Data-Centres.html
It is presumed that it will use 700 GWH! (1 GWH = 1,000,000 kWh)

Amazon already has spot instances which are awesome, but really difficult to use without a big investment, I have yet to use it in a side project. Amazon Lambda probably runs on spot instances with real instances to back it up in case the pulled, but it does not change pricing based on time of the day or any other factors.

The future of distributed multi-cloud computing is really exciting!

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Kevin Simper

I really like building stuff with React.js and Docker and also Meetups ❤