Amazon Web Services has launched a marketplace for its customers to sell their unused cloud computing resources, reports Tom's IT Pro.
Customers pay a one-time fee to reserve capacity for a certain term and can then, for example, sell their unusued capacity if their project ends before it's needed.
Customers are normally able to sell up to $50,000 in reserved instances every year, according to Amazon (though this figure can be raised upon request). They can be sold as long as they've been active for 30 days, and Amazon will collect 12 per cent of the sale price.
With definitions of what "cloud" means still fairly murky, this new feature exemplifies what a public cloud is really about: elasticity and scalability. For Amazon customers, this adds a new dimension what those mean, as the pay-per-use model is becoming more robust.