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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

> compute not been commoditized and resold through public markets.

I'm not very good at language, but I take it cloud computing (and e.g. spot markets) don't fit this bill, right?

I could imagine a company that abstracts over the cloud providers that can combine the spot markets etc somehow, but then I don't think the cloud providers would be happy with that because they want exclusive contracts.

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There’s a company called Archera doing this - they’re doing well, cash flowing.

https://archera.ai/

However, I think it’s 1. absolutely not insurance, and they’ll have to stop using that word when the lawyers get involved and 2. best understood as an alternative AWS plan to GIs and SPs. So essentially there’s a combination of discount/term/guaranteed capacity that the market wants and Amazon isn’t supplying, and Archera are supplying that synthetically. Cool business!

This sort of business model is generally known as "cost engineering". It can work, to an extent, when you're small enough to kind of fly under the radar. Once you grow enough to start impacting margins for the big players that actually control the resources then they become highly motivated to crush you.

That would certainly be an obstacle.

Hypothecally it could be beneficial to other smaller providers. I think it all comes down to how the purchased compute would end up being used by purchasers

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