There’s a funny reason why no one auctions compute instances at large scales anymore. EC2 Spot Instances, until about ~2017 were a “true” uniform price auction. Many quickly gamed the system. The lowest accepted bid was the clearing price. By bidding ridiculously high (999.99$ an hour), you could basically guarantee that your spot instance never gets kicked…but *most* of the time you’ll still be paying a reasonable price. Well…until the unthinkable happened. On September 26, 2011, m2.2xlarge in us-east suddenly became capacity constrained. Enough people were using the “haha, 999 bid” strategy that the clearing price of the spot instance rose from $0.44 an hour to $999.99 an hour for a two-hour period! AFAIK, no major cloud provider currently uses an auction market for spot instances…exactly to avoid this kind of thing (among other funny bidding games).