What Is Cloud Bursting?

In enterprise computing, cloud bursting is a method of using additional cloud deployments to quickly ramp computing capacity up and down in response to spikes in demand or traffic. Cloud bursting can be a valuable backstop for protecting organizations against overloaded systems that cause service interruptions. 

Why Is Cloud Bursting Useful?

Cloud bursting is a response to the perpetual challenge of balancing IT capacity with demand in an efficient way. As the computing needs and costs of digital enterprises continue to grow, some seek to avoid provisioning for infrequent spikes in demand. Other organizations may want to engineer backup capacity to support critical applications; still others may be using cloud bursting technology to move computing deployments from place to place based on cost optimization. 

Cloud Bursting Use Cases

• A marketing campaign or product release will be expected to cause a large surge in traffic.
• Cloud bursting can simply be used to protect critical applications from a resource-heavy project elsewhere within an enterprise.
• During the application development process, compute needs may be hard to predict.
• AI applications are famously resource intensive and may unexpectedly overwhelm existing capacity. Cloud bursting can help ensure that AI applications can perform to expectations.

Cloud Bursting Benefits 

The key advantage of cloud bursting is protection from overloaded systems and possible downtime, which could be very costly. Cloud bursting can also be used to help manage costs—in part because organizations that deploy it don’t need to spend budget on keeping cloud resources on hand and unused.  

However, while cloud bursting may save on the overall costs of full-time IT resources, the costs of cloud bursting can be hard to predict. If cloud bursting occurs frequently, costs can add up quickly. In other words, cloud bursting may not be viable for regular operations but is best suited for covering infrequent or emergency resource overflow.

Cloud bursting presents technical challenges as well and requires systems that are more complex than a standard cloud deployment. It’s usually not practical, advisable, or compliant to move large amounts of data back and forth among different deployments. 

Types of Cloud Bursting

Manual bursting offers the greatest degree of control but requires deep engagement with monitoring and balancing tools. For this reason, manual bursting is often used for one-time bursts or temporary deployments. 

Automated bursting is more typical, with provisioning and de-provisioning based on policies defined by the user.

Distributed load balancing is a type of cloud bursting that calls for continuously operating workloads across a combination of public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises deployments. Distributed load balancing can help optimize performance by improving proximity to data sources or users. It can also be a strategy to increase resilience by building in backups and redundancy across deployments.

Cost-optimizing cloud bursting can also be used to distribute loads based on cost. With the right tools, engineers can monitor spot prices for cloud computing and move services accordingly. 

How Is Cloud Bursting Implemented?

Generally, enterprises will need to adhere to some or all of the following prerequisites to use cloud bursting.

• Monitoring tools. First and foremost, cloud bursting requires advanced tools for monitoring IT activity to provide the detailed, real-time information needed to fine-tune bursting.
• Cloud orchestration. Enterprises using cloud bursting should have robust cloud orchestration capabilities in place. This means not just software but also hardware, networking, and most importantly, skilled personnel. 
• Load balancing software. This software is built into, or interfaces with, cloud orchestration and network management tools and provides visibility and controls for moving workloads.
• Infrastructure upgrades. Cloud bursting is a complex interaction among disparate compute resources. Implementing it for the first time may require upgrade or expansion of current data center deployments to the newest, fastest technologies.
• Suitable workloads. This is a critical factor for success. Rules for data governance, security, and compliance may prohibit cloud bursting for some workloads. For example, an application that depends on a large relational database, or one that needs to support low-latency user experiences, may not be a candidate for cloud bursting. On the other hand, containerized workloads work well for cloud bursting, an example of the agility they can provide.

Hybrid Cloud Mobility Is the Key to Effective Cloud Bursting

In this article, we covered what cloud bursting is, how it works, and why it’s critical to an organization’s ability to balance IT resources with demand in an efficient way. The essence of effective cloud bursting lies in hybrid cloud mobility, which is instrumental in ensuring a seamless interaction between private and public clouds. Cloud bursting is a technique used to manage unexpected surges in traffic by temporarily leveraging public cloud resources when the capacity of the private cloud is exceeded. Hybrid cloud mobility facilitates the easy and rapid movement of workloads between the clouds, ensuring that resources are available exactly when and where they’re needed without any significant latency. 

By employing a robust hybrid cloud mobility strategy, organizations can significantly enhance their ability to respond to demand spikes, thereby ensuring continuous operations and optimal performance even during peak loads. Through advanced orchestration tools and automated policies, hybrid cloud mobility can streamline the cloud bursting process, making it a reliable and efficient solution for managing the dynamic demands of modern-day applications and services. 

Looking for a comprehensive hybrid cloud infrastructure solution that can give you the data mobility you need to practice effective cloud bursting? Everpure Cloud Dedicated, Portworx®, and Purity CloudSnap™ simplify the movement of applications and data between clouds, making backup, disaster recovery, and dev/test operations more efficient.