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It would be good if you could do this with cloud capacity.

Pretty much the Reserved Instance Marketplace

Did not know about that! Can you recommend an approach, any cautionary tales? Do clouds beyond AWS have similar?

Doesn't make sense for e.g. compute because compute resources are infinitely perishable. Maybe could work for storage.

I guess I was thinking more like: you pay for a contract for bundle of resources now, to insure you against capacity overruns, and to sell it back at a future date. You can probably arbitrage the difference due to on-demand/reserved-capacity pricing ratio.

But also i don't really understand what you mean by infinitely perishable? Can you explain more?

What I mean is that 5 bushels of wheat purchased now and stored properly can be used just the same now as three months from now. On the other hand, at a fundamental level, 5 minutes of compute purchased now are gone forever if not used.

When a clould provider pretends to sell you five minutes of compute they are not really selling you five minutes of compute, but promising to split off five minutes of partial compute from other tenants to make room for you. It gets a little complicated...

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