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Over the last five years, the cloud has become a very attractive model as it allows businesses to stretch every dollar of their IT budgets by provisioning storage, memory and computing resources on-demand. One of the advantages of the cloud is the flexibility and scalability it provides – particularly for organizations who embrace a hybrid model with some applications housed in the cloud and some remaining on premise. Cloud infrastructure makes it easy to add resources as needed, quickly and cost effectively. The process of migrating an application to a public cloud when additional resources are needed for a specific period of time is called ‘bursting.’ In a cloud solution, bursting can help organizations address two main challenges: Performance issues due to capacity overflow and overpaying for unutilized resources.
Bursting not only allows enterprises to remain in control of their applications, but it also gives them the opportunity to leverage the benefits of cloud. While most high-performance applications can benefit from bursting, the two most common use cases are: applications with peaks in demand and applications used for redundancy if traditional environments become affected by unforeseen events. Each use case is illustrated below with real-life examples of how businesses in different sectors can leverage bursting capabilities in the cloud.
Use Case 1: Consider a retailer who expects their e-commerce site to triple its traffic during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This retailer could burst to a public cloud solution during peak seasons and only pay for the resources they consume, when utilized. Their applications and critical data remain in the physical environment. If they were to deploy additional physical servers, the organization would have to deal with the time and financial burden of managing them, only to use them during seasonal upswings.
Use Case 2: A mid-size bank often relies on thousands of new and legacy applications to run its business. While all core-business applications run in physical servers, the bank relies on the cloud as a standby site in the event of a loss of power or some other system glitch. Although financial institutions tend to shy away from using the cloud for critical applications and data, cloud infrastructure is the perfect method for back-up and disaster recovery because the cost of physically replicating the environment for thousands of applications would be incredibly high. Similar to the retail example where the reduction of available capacity ‘activates’ cloud bursting, server or data center failure can activate the back-up. Disaster recovery in the cloud makes sense because the application would run in one place or the other during the down time and back to the data center once the failure is over, all without human interaction.
Bursting allows businesses to leverage a hybrid model that provides the best of both worlds – reliable access to the compute capacity organizations need every day, with a cost-effective and dynamic way to deal with unexpected spikes.
To learn more about bursting, be sure to watch the following video:
