What is Cloud Bursting?

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are huge annual sales events that drive millions of users to websites and brick and mortar stores across the world. Companies embrace these sales to kick off the highly anticipated holiday shopping season that significantly impacts their revenue, and while the sales results typically speak on the success of these initiatives, how do websites hold up?

In events where traffic is significantly increased outside of the normal user base, such as through Black Friday or highly anticipated product releases, many websites struggle to keep up with the traffic and demand. Slow response times and service downtime are the least of your worries when unexpected spikes in traffic occur- a negative web experience can severely impact a prospect’s view of your website, and consequently, your company and products. To release unnecessary pressure on your systems and cloud resources, many companies practice cloud bursting. 

Cloud bursting is a method that allows the load on a private cloud to be spread onto a public cloud, therefore reducing the overall stress placed upon both by peak demands. Once spikes in demand force a public cloud to work at 100% of its capacity, additional traffic will be offloaded onto a public cloud without interrupting service. 

In a hybrid cloud deployment, cloud bursting is extremely important because it's able to mobilize your private cloud and a public cloud to their fullest extents, ensuring that all local resources for business critical applications are only used when needed without exhausting any machines. The implications of cloud bursting on cloud services is extremely prevalent, especially in an environment that guarantees events where traffic surges are increased drastically. That being said, there are different types of cloud bursting methods to consider.

Different Methods of Cloud Bursting

Similar to the approaches to optimizing cloud computing itself, cloud bursting varies in the methods that best work for your specific business needs. Such methods include: 

Manual Bursting

Manual bursting involves manually allocating and pulling public cloud resources as needed, letting companies directly control the flow of resources and how much they spend. The manual aspect of this bursting also applies to monitoring and flipping the switch on when to transition to public cloud provisioning, ensuring that there’s plenty to do manually. A manual bursting method is best suited for situations where traffic spikes are unpredictable and where you could provision public cloud resources on the fly.

Automatic Bursting

As the name suggests, automatic bursting is automated provisioning of public cloud resources in order to offload traffic from private clouds. Companies that engage in automatic bursting have the responsibility of defining policies that dictate how bursting is handled, as well as pulling from resource utilization rates and performance. Automated bursting and tools switch applications to the public cloud once traffic becomes too overwhelming, becoming the go-to approach for handling unexpected workload spikes, giving less control to professionals at the expense of automations. 

Distributed Load Balancing

Distributed load balancing is similar to the two aforementioned bursting methods, but requires distributing the workload across both private and public clouds. Suitable for companies with predictable traffic levels, load balancing tools are employed to distribute traffic to public clouds based on a previously defined threshold. Load balancing and its associated tools ensure that resources are consumed efficiently and performance is maintained, guaranteeing a stronger uptime for the company. 

The Pros and Cons of Cloud Bursting

Cloud bursting provides a unique approach to maximizing and optimizing your valuable cloud resources. Outside of this crucial aspect, cloud bursting enables businesses to leverage powerful benefits, such as:

Increase to Flexibility and Scaling

Cloud bursting leverages the reliability and security of a private cloud infrastructure while letting users enjoy the flexibility of a public cloud build. Applications and websites utilizing cloud bursting methodology are able to easily transition to public cloud resources based on capacity needs, letting resource consumption scale up or down based on the optimal amount of resources needed. The flexibility to this approach is truly unrivaled, with the transition to public cloud resources often being seamless and not interruption service at crucial times. 

Huge Economic Savings

Through a cloud bursting approach, resources are only consumed as needed. A company only pays for those extra resources when required by the application or website to function. These cost savings are also seen within the public cloud infrastructure itself- cloud bursting can transition to a more cost-effective public cloud at the press of a button or once demand triggers the transition. 

Uptime Spikes and Traffic Handling

Cloud bursting enables companies to ensure that a perfect customer experience is provided through a website that can weather anything. The allocation of additional resources through bursting increases the uptime of a website significantly, handling even the most dense and unexpected traffic. 

While cloud bursting offers the means to tackle unpredictable traffic spikes, there are certainly cons when it comes to the method. Some of which include: 

Security Woes

Despite the seamless transition that cloud bursting touts, moving data and applications between different cloud services can be risky, especially if a public cloud is involved. Public clouds themselves can be secure depending on the service provider, but compromising that provider could mean compromising your business critical application in the process. A solution could be to have an auto-updated replication of your application and use a data center within the cloud bursting process.

Incompatibility Between Sources

The flexibility of data housing that cloud bursting offers presents a set of challenges on their own. Two popular options for a provider opposite of a private cloud server include on-premise data centers and public clouds, both of which require different technologies and management tools unique to their own needs. 

Cloud Bursting with Lyrid

In certain times of the year, companies can expect their computing resources to be used up by an increasing number of users. Other times, traffic can drive up compute demand unexpectedly, often blindsiding a company if their application or website is not well equipped to handle anything. 

Embracing a hybrid cloud or multi cloud approach can be the difference between having a service outage during a crucial moment and capitalizing on peak traffic. With Lyrid, you’re able to enjoy the privacy and security of a private cloud with the plentiful resources of a public cloud and data center. Uptime increases, Kubernetes automations, and access to global data center partners are just a few of the benefits of working with Lyrid.

To learn more about Lyrid can service your applications, book a call with us or visit our website!