Lately I’ve been interested to learn and understand more about cryptocurrency technologies and given my background as a cloud engineer I though that the idea to combine both technologies (Cloud computing and Cryptocurrency) could be worthy to share it.

First of all, let’s analyze what has been accomplished in Cloud Computing. Mainly it has helped to optimize the usage of infrastructure resources, through virtualization technologies and informed decision making algorithms which help to allocate resources of a physical infrastructure in a wisdom manner. In the implementation of a private cloud, the way to determine future workloads is complex and depends on multiple factors, this results in the creation of a pool of available resources to satisfy these unpredictable demands. This potential capacity represents a cost for whoever is responsible for the infrastructure and business owners have to consider it on their budget given that these resources will remain idle until are used by someone.

Multiple efforts have been developed to tackle these costs, most of them can be summarized in the following categories:

  • Reduction of the energy consumption. These techniques offer the creation of algorithms for balancing workloads of a cloud computing implementation offering the alternative to shut down those unused resources. At server level, it’s possible to control the number of operative CPUs and/or cores of the server reducing the power consumption.
  • Improve resource planning. Their goal is to optimize the number of resources required for the business through the monitoring of current and/or past workloads as source of prediction techniques.

Combining both techniques can result in a better resource utilization given that it’s possible to reduce the size of the pool to the minimum required and control its energy consumption to nothing or almost nothing. But even in that case, the need for a pool of resources is still mandatory and these resources will require physical space in the data center.

So what about taking advantage of the incentive offered for mining cryptocurrencies and use the cloud idle resources to perform these tasks, maybe the operational expenditure (OPEX) can be compensated with the revenue generated for these processes, processes executed in resources that have been already paid and placed in the Data center.