Amazon Auction Cloud Computing Capacity

Amazon on Monday began offering its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) customers the chance to bid on unused computing capacity

Businesses can now bid for computing capacity during times of low demand to save money.

EC2 continues to offer two other pricing methods: On-Demand Instances, which are charged at a published rate, and Reserved Instances, pre-paid at a discounted rate for use up to three years later.

Typical jobs for EC2 involve analyzing data sets, media file format conversion, or Web crawling for a search index, for example.