Visible Prices Make Markets Work

Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Register HERE 

“VMTurbo ‘invisible hand’ control freak grabs more virty servers”

“VMTurbo wants to get humans out of the way and automate the allocation of resources using the “invisible hand” of market economics – pushing the admins out of the loop. And with Operations Manager 3.3, VMTurbo is once again expanding its range of coverage over virtual infrastructure while at the same time adding some projection capabilities to its control freak.

The basic idea behind the economic scheduling engine inside of VMTurbo’s Operations Manager is simple enough: People, departments, divisions, and groups within a company are given virtual “budgets” from which they can consume resources and together they constitute a market for the limited compute resources available in the data center. As demand for particular resources rise, so does its price, in very appropriate Adam Smith fashion, and similarly, as demand falls, so does the price. The economic engine is not just about virtual billing, but about the placement and timing of workloads to achieve the most efficient use of those scarce resources.”

Comment

What exactly is invisible when you use VISIBLE prices “in a very Adam Smith fashion” to allocate “limited” computer “resources”?

What exactly is the so-called “invisible hand” bringing to the allocation decision?

This is the nonsense of the week!

There is no such thing as “an invisible hand” of the market.  And most important, Adam Smith never said there was such an entity.