What is cloud bursting?

In cloud computing, cloud bursting is a configuration that’s set up between a private cloud and a public cloud to deal with peaks in IT demand. If an organization using a private cloud reaches 100 percent of its resource capacity, the overflow traffic is directed to a public cloud so there’s no interruption of services.

In addition to flexibility and self-service functionality, the key advantage to cloud bursting is economical savings. You only pay for the additional resources when there is a demand for those resources - no more spending on extra capacity you’re not using or trying to predict demand peaks and fluctuations. An application can be applied to the private cloud, then burst to the public cloud only when necessary to meet peak demands. Plus, cloud bursting can also be used to shoulder processing burdens by moving basic applications to the public cloud to free up local resources for business-critical applications. When using cloud bursting, you should consider security and compliance requirements, latency, load balancing, and platform compatibility.