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> Needing this amount of resources implies that Snap is expecting huge growth. It's a hedge. If they don't grow as rapidly as expected then they're betting tha
by Alex3917 10y ago
> Needing this amount of resources implies that Snap is expecting huge growth.
It's a hedge. If they don't grow as rapidly as expected then they're betting that someone else will buy the excess reserved capacity from them for close to market rates. So in the case that they only use 1.5 billion dollars worth of hosting, they're betting that they'll be out, say, $25M rather than $500M. On the other hand they want to make sure that if they do grow rapidly then Google has the capacity to meet their needs.
- matt_wulfeck 10y agoI've never heard of anyone buying excess cloud capacity from a private party. Is this a thing? Is there a market for this? Sounds like a security nightmare.
- ohashi 10y agohttp://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-market-selling-guide.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-market...
- Alex3917 10y agoAWS reserved marketplace? Security wise it's no different than any other instance; specific machines aren't associated with the party who originally reserved the capacity in any way.
- matt_wulfeck 10y agoThey're still just buying it from Amazon.
- late2part 10y agoYou're right. The deals businesses do at this level preclude you from selling the resources you've purchased at a discount to another party.
- yclept 10y agoYes there are marketplaces for this with some providers like AWS. You are buying capacity (like a voucher) for a server not a particular server.
- dekhn 10y agoCycle Computing does this. ATLAS, an LHC experiment, recently demonstrated this. I even built a product at Google that made this possible. We used Native Client (users compiled their binaries using the NaCl toolchain) as one part of the security container.