Cloud provider Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Web Services is launching the Reserved Instance Marketplace, an online market that provides customers the ability to sell their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Reserved Instances to other businesses and organizations.
Reserved Instances enable customers to make a one-time payment to reserve computing capacity for a specific period of time and receive a discount on the hourly charge for that instance, explained AWS.
AWS stressed that Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances purchased on the Reserved Instance Marketplace offer the same capacity reservations as Reserved Instances purchased directly from AWS.
The marketplace "takes the pain of poor guesswork out of cloud capacity planning," observed James Staten, principal analyst serving infrastructure and operations professionals at Forrester, in a blog post.
"[C]apacity planning remains a black art. But we no longer need to take the black eye that comes with capacity planning--the wasted overspending. Now you can correct these errors in planning by selling the overage back to the market," Staten added.
Enterprises can recoup the costs of cloud capacity that they do not use, minus a 12 percent service fee charged by AWS. But firms need to determine that they will not use instances early enough that they will still be valuable to the market, Staten explained.
"What's most interesting about this move is that it is a business innovation--not a technology innovation--and one that we expect will drive up AWS customer loyalty and differentiation for enterprises," he wrote.
The Forrester analyst noted that the marketplace also enables companies to buy instances at a lower price than the spot market rate and without a multi-year commitment.
