Is your demand spiky or unpredictable?

An introduction to cloud bursting and how it can help

In this, the first in a series of articles, The Cloud Community team introduces cloud bursting, its benefits, and some of the pros and cons of implementing it in your organisation.

From Black Friday shopping, a big event or advertising campaign, or a successful social media post, your demand can spike at known and sometimes unexpected times.

What is cloud bursting?

Cloud bursting is an appealing choice for organisations looking to provision for spikey or unpredictable demand. These peaks and troughs can make on-premise infrastructure unappealing in two senses – firstly by needing to provision for additional capacity that is then not utilised apart from in peak periods; secondly, with the lack of ability to quickly provision more capacity during peak periods should the need arise.

Instead, cloud bursting is a way to introduce elasticity to your demand planning, with a pay-as-you-go style model that makes the right resource accessible to provision for highs and lows of demand.

What’s not to love?

The downside is that implementing a cloud bursting strategy takes a bit of time, resources and effort. Monitoring workloads over a reasonable period of time is required to capture the right data to guide provisioning.

The concept of cloud bursting may also not be for every type of business. For organisations with more stable or flatlining workloads, there are likely to be more cost effective ways of providing the compute power required. Indeed, cloud bursting is most common in industries such as retail, events ticketing, or media providers.