The problems exist in long tail cloud market
[en]
As a software engineer, I rent cloud servers from AWS and Alibaba Cloud. Most of the time, people can’t evaluate preciously the resources they really need and will configure much more than needed to avoid high load. As a result, I face the situation that paying a monthly/yearly billing to cloud server providers but can’t fully utilize the machines. At this point, I want to find some way to monetize idle resources such as computing, storage and bandwidth.
Cost of sales in cloud market
Cloud service has been proved to be a good business, it contains computing, network, database, file distribution, data analysis, storage etc. According to the prospectus of UCloud in 2020, the cost of sales is equal to the cost of R&D.
Cost Revenue Ratio in sales
Though I have the servers which are rented from cloud providers or private servers hosted in IDC, the size of my resources is too small to interest the cloud salesperson.
When I contact the salesperson, the threshold they are requiring is much higher than mine, and due to the high labor cost, they don’t want to pay much time in small users, which costs the same time but get tiny revenue back(high Cost Revenue Ratio).
However, if we aggregate the small users and represent the group to contact the salesperson, they are happy to offer three sale units. Cost Revenue Ratio meets their requirement.
How to reach long tail users with low cost
The Cost Revenue Ratio has implied the traditional sales impossibility, so the road meets the end? Not exactly. The mining in blockchain offers a brilliant idea.
The best way to acquire the long tail users is not from sales, using virus spreading instead. By offering a permissionless network in the blockchain world and defining the protocol standard, people start mining.
Monero(XMR) shows us a good example. They don’t pay much attention to the marketing part, offering a permissionless CPU mining network on the contract. Therefore, when people reach computing resources, they will consider mining and earning money from Monero network. No one cares about the size of your resources, and you just do mining. Sounds funny, ha.
Don’t contempt the long tail users, the size of aggregated long tail users will punch the cloud market. Besides, due to the sunk cost we reached right now, the platform can lower the price significantly for cloud providers and increase resource utilization.
