A cloud for cloud-trading

Here is something that has been bandied about as a potential marketplace for some time – a trading exchange for cloud capacity. Not only is German financial services provider, Deutsche Boerse Group, starting one up but it is using the cloud to drive it.

The Deutsche Boerse Cloud Exchange AG, to give it its full title, is reckoned to be the world’s first vendor neutral marketplace for cloud computing capacities. It will enable IT resources to be traded like securities and energy, electronically and within seconds.

The new company aims to launch its service, a cloud computing spot market, in the first quarter 2014. Its goal is very simple: fundamentally change how cloud computing resources are bought and sold.

Berlin-based cloud management software vendor, Zimory,  has been handed the task  of being the strategic partner delivering the cloud technology. Its IaaS cloud management software will be the foundations of the Exchange’s settlement process, creating the physical connection between buyers and sellers.

It offers open APIs, scalability, multi-tenancy and a decoupled architecture. An important part of the plan is for the Cloud Exchange to be open so that other cloud management stacks and standards can be integrated in as and when required. Adherence to standards will be a core part of the development and growth of the Exchange, making services easy to compare and enabling users to distribute their applications between multiple providers.

The goal is to provide an environment which delivers to both buyers and sellers the flexibility and business agility required to trade, compute, and store capacity securely, so they can buy and sell capacity quickly and easily, without being locked into the technology or offering of only one provider.

The Deutsche Boerse Group has been managing marketplaces for financial assets for many decades, and the company aims to couple that experience with new technology to create a different way for companies to acquire, and sell on, cloud capacity as required.  

The idea is not new, of course. An early demonstration of the process came from HP’s Bristol Labs, which back in 2003 was using the active, Bristol-based group of small animation specialists to help demonstrate early cloud capabilities and operational models by offering them rendering services. As part of the experiment, each participant was provided with `Monopoly Money’ with which to buy rendering time on the computers, with the cost being lower the earlier it was bought. If not used, however, the time could be traded with another animator with an urgent need.

Now that cloud services is becoming mainstream, it makes sense to see the idea re-emerging. It should be of benefit to both Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and business users that have signed up for a given service capacity which at times can be surplus to requirement. It should also help to reduce costs for users across the board, as CSPs will have a known marketplace to sell short-term spare capacity that might otherwise need to be collectively pre-paid by subscription customers.

"Deutsche Boerse Cloud Exchange will fundamentally change how cloud computing resources are bought and sold," said Ruediger Baumann, CEO of Zimory. "The time when contract negotiations took months will be over for most businesses. Standardising IaaS offerings will revolutionise the cloud computing market in a similar way to how the GSM standard changed cellular telephony. Cloud services will be provided faster and in more varied ways. New cloud computing industries, application areas and brokerage services will develop. The necessary prerequisites for this new age of cloud computing are industry standards for IaaS and a neutral, secure marketplace, which we are creating together with Deutsche Boerse group."