One of the complaints I've heard from users of public cloud users, and especially of those who use Amazon EC2, is that the instances available are not provided in a wide enough range of sizes and jump from one size to another in steps that are too large.
The problem with this is that the user ends up not utilizing all of the available resources of the machine they are paying for, which is somewhat ironic given that one of the biggest benefits touted for cloud computing is better utilization (as you are supposed to be paying only for what you use).
Librato (Twitter: librato) is a start-up attempting to attack this problem with their newly beta-released Silverline product. I spent some time with Fred van den Bosch (CEO) and John Wernke (VP Marketing) and was impressed.
Once you deploy Silverline (which takes a couple of minutes) on your Amazon instances (or any other instances in internal or external clouds), it "sponges up" unused cycles so that you can run apps that are non-time-sensitive such as analytics apps or various batch processes. And the beauty is that you are doing this on a resource you were paying for anyway.
Check out the video demo below. I'm curious to know what you think of this and what you think could be interesting use cases. They are now offering sign-up to a free beta.
Please share your thoughts in the comments.
