since the market launched earlier this month, Reuven Cohen, founder and chief technologist for Enomaly, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.
SpotCloud is a market where end users can shop for low-cost, on-demand computing services from a variety of providers. Enomaly developed the market to help its customers, who are cloud service providers, sell off any excess capacity they might have, even at a discount.
"Hundreds" of buyers and sellers have registered to use the service, Cohen said Wednesday. SpotCloud is still in beta, and Enomaly is approving companies before they can start buying or selling.
"One of the more interesting statistics is the ratio of buyers to sellers is tracking at 5:1 for buyers. This shows there's a lot of buy-side demand for the service," he said.
. For now, only service providers that use Enomaly's Elastic Computing Platform software can sell their services in the market. But that's set to change.
"Due to strong demand from non ECP-based cloud providers and [infrastructure-as-a-service] platforms, we have decided to open up our marketplace to any and all platforms," Cohen said. Within the next week, Enomaly will publish instructions to let service providers that use other cloud platforms sell on its market.
Alternatively, they can connect to the market using free software that Enomaly will provide. Next week the company will start offering a free "feature-limited" version of Enomaly that will let cloud providers as well as private data centers sell capacity in SpotCloud. They will need to install the ECP SpotCloud Edition software "on a few spare servers" to participate, Enomaly said.
Using the ECP SpotCloud Edition is easier than joining the market by following Enomaly's integration instructions, Cohen said. "With the ECP SpotCloud edition you basically can install the IaaS platform on a few servers and be up in running in minutes. Otherwise they need to implement against our API, which is much more complicated and time consuming," he said.
The IDG News Service