Cloud bursting What is cloud bursting?
When compute resource demand surpasses local data center capacity, cloud bursting dynamically extends an organization's on-premises infrastructure to a public cloud. This lets companies withstand traffic or workload increases without the need to overprovision hardware. Cloud bursting improves scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness since firms pay for resources during business peaks.
- How does cloud bursting work?
- Benefits of cloud bursting
- Challenges and solutions in cloud bursting
- When do organizations need cloud bursting?
- HPE and cloud bursting
How does cloud bursting work?
Dynamic resource allocation improves cloud scalability. Cloud bursting allows enterprise companies to stretch their computing capacity from on-premise infrastructure to a public cloud to meet resource demand changes. This technique can be used with on-premise private cloud (primary or local cloud) and an off-premises public cloud.
How cloud bursting works:
- Manual bursting: Managers monitor resource utilization and manually scale resources when using manual cloud bursting. Administrators deploy public cloud resources when demand exceeds local infrastructure. This technique offers fine-tuned control, but human interaction is needed to activate scaling, which may delay reaction time.
- Automated bursting: Automated cloud bursting uses monitoring tools and predetermined policies to scale resources depending on thresholds. These thresholds might be based on CPU utilization, network traffic, or other indicators. Automated systems can quickly and effectively assign public cloud resources to meet changing requests, enabling dynamic scalability.
- Distributed load balancing: Cloud bursting requires distributed load balancing to optimize resource usage across private and public clouds. No single component becomes a bottleneck because load balancing algorithms disperse requests or tasks across available resources. This distributed architecture automatically distributes workload across on-premises and cloud resources to maintain excellent performance during demand surges.
What are the benefits of cloud bursting?
Cloud bursting improves IT infrastructure efficiency, flexibility, and performance:
- Cost: Cloud bursting offers cost savings by allowing enterprises to scale resources as needed. Additional public cloud resources may be automatically integrated during peak demand, preventing permanent overprovisioning, by allowing businesses to pay for what they consume.
- Control: Organizations have more control over their IT infrastructure using cloud bursting. Administrators can automate scaling by dynamically setting policies and thresholds to assign resources following preset criteria. Automation improves operational management and decreases manual intervention.
- Flexibility: Cloud bursting improves flexibility by enabling workloads to transition effortlessly between on-premises and public cloud infrastructure. With this flexibility, organizations may optimize resource utilization and handle varying workloads without losing performance.
- Continuity: To ensure business continuity, cloud bursting ensures that applications and services remain available and responsive during demand surges. Despite unforeseen demand surges, dynamic resource scaling ensures service continuity and performance.
- Efficiency: Cloud bursting offers resource usage efficiency as a primary benefit. Organizations can maximize performance without retaining surplus capacity during regular demand by using public cloud resources as needed. The IT infrastructure becomes more efficient and cost-effective.
What are the challenges in cloud bursting?
The following points highlight key considerations in cloud bursting:
- During burst occurrences, application performance may suffer due to latency in data transfer between public cloud and on-premises infrastructures.
- In hybrid environments, it can be challenging to maintain data mobility between on-premises and cloud-based systems.
- Data movement between environments may introduce authentication and access control vulnerabilities across different infrastructures.
To address these considerations, several strategies can be implemented:
- Processing data close to the source through edge computing minimizes delays in data transmission, lessening the impact of large-scale data transfers during burst events.
- Implementing containerization and orchestration solutions such as Docker and Kubernetes can facilitate application mobility across on-premises and cloud settings.
- Security concerns are mitigated by implementing robust identity management systems and secure networking protocols. Strict access controls protect burst scaling resources, and data in transit is encrypted.
These strategies contribute to a more effective, secure, and responsive hybrid cloud architecture while addressing challenges associated with cloud bursting.
When do organizations need cloud bursting?
Organizational needs for cloud bursting:
Software development:
- Variable workloads: During software development, organizations often experience fluctuating demands for computing resources. Cloud bursting allows them to scale up resources when intensive tasks such as code compilation, testing, or deployment require additional capacity.
- Resource optimization: Developers can benefit from on-demand access to additional computing power from the public cloud, ensuring efficient resource utilization without needing a permanently expanded on-premises infrastructure.
Marketing campaigns:
- Bursts of traffic: Marketing campaigns, especially those involving online promotions or product launches, can lead to sudden spikes in website traffic. Cloud bursting enables organizations to expand their server capacity seamlessly to handle increased web traffic during these campaign peaks.
- Cost-Efficient Scaling: Rather than maintaining excess capacity year-round, organizations can leverage the public cloud for burst scaling during specific marketing initiatives, optimizing costs while ensuring a responsive online presence.
Extensive data modeling and queries:
- Compute-intensive tasks: Big data analytics often involves computationally intensive tasks like complex modeling and queries. Cloud bursting allows organizations to access additional computing resources on demand, ensuring the timely processing of large datasets without overwhelming local infrastructure.
- Scalable processing power: Public cloud resources provide scalable processing power for big data workloads, allowing organizations to handle peak demands and derive insights from large datasets efficiently.
Seasonal businesses:
- Fluctuating demand: Seasonal businesses, like retail during holidays or outdoor activities during specific weather conditions, experience fluctuating demand for IT resources. Cloud bursting is instrumental in dynamically scaling infrastructure to accommodate increased demand during peak seasons.
- Cost savings: Rather than investing in and maintaining infrastructure for the highest seasonal demand, organizations can use cloud bursting to scale resources as needed, optimizing costs while ensuring a seamless customer experience.
What are HPE solutions and services for cloud bursting?
1) Hybrid by design, HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric Software helps organizations seamlessly access, manage, organize, and govern their data across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Cloud bursting lets enterprises dynamically shift IT resources from on-premises to the public cloud to accommodate peak workloads or demand changes. HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric can seamlessly and efficiently extend on-premises infrastructure to the cloud for organizations. This permits more agile task management based on business needs.
Highlights of HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric:
- Critical technology layer that provides seamless unified access to files, objects, tables and streaming data from a hybrid data plane.
- Supports industry standard analytic interfaces allowing organizations to protect existing architectures while you transform to modern analytic approaches.
- Global namespace delivers a common point of access to any data set under management by HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric.
- Apply fine-grained policies for access control, security, management and governance, as well as track data lineage consistently across hybrid multicloud environments.
2) HPE Services (Advisory and Professional) - designing and provisioning cloud architectures and the surrounding security environment:
- Analyzing application workloads and resource requirements: Which applications are best suited for cloud bursting based on their resource needs and fluctuating demand patterns.
- Designing and implementing the cloud bursting architecture: This involves choosing the right public cloud provider, configuring automatic scaling policies, and establishing secure connections between on-premises and cloud environments.
- Ensuring security and compliance: implementing security measures and follow compliance regulations for data and applications transferred to the public cloud during bursts.
