[Alex3917]

> 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]

I'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.

[Alex3917]

AWS 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]

They're still just buying it from Amazon.

[late2part]

You're right. The deals businesses do at this level preclude you from selling the resources you've purchased at a discount to another party.

[ohashi]

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri-market...

[yclept]

Yes 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]

Cycle 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.