Business Transformation Opportunities of Leveraging Cloud Bursting Solutions

Introduction

Businesses and Organisations are experiencing a huge surge in customer uptake of its services and products as a result of the explosion of smart user devices and communication technologies. This unprecedented spike is ever growing and the challenges of scaling enterprise infrastructure to cope with the extreme compute workloads inhibits organizations from optimizing scarce capital resources in meeting consumer expectations at a competitive advantage. These challenges create under-utilized excess capacity of expensive compute equipment and a dwindling return on investment (ROI) balance sheet.

Overview

Businesses are focused on increasing profitability and competitiveness by driving IT infrastructure performance as demand dictates. The Cloud Bursting technology solution provides the leverage that businesses need to take advantage of opportunities (e.g. pay-as-you-go pricing) in provisioning compute resources on-the-fly and at the same time providing a fluid back-end integration of interoperability between local and virtually hosted cloud platforms and deployments with a seamless user experience.

Cloud Bursting as a Technology Solution

What is Cloud bursting?

Cloud bursting is a deployment method used to provision cloud computing resources to handle unexpected peak capacity of an organization's business activities. When demand exceeds capacity, cloud bursting provides businesses with the leverage to access additional compute resources from third party cloud service providers in other to scale their business operations to meet demand. This business solution gives organizations additional flexibility to handle and meet critical business regulatory requirements which their traditional data centres cannot meet at short notice. This helps free up local resources for more optimal use.

How does Cloud bursting work?

An On-premises datacentre or hosted private cloud is the primary launch environment for deploying a cloud bursting model. It leverages the public cloud in times of increased compute traffic to migrate and load share excess workloads that the data centre does not have the capacity to process. Once compute traffic reduces to the previous or normal capacity, the workloads in the public cloud is scaled back to the private data centre for continuous operations.

Cloud bursts can be triggered to run either automatically based on configured threshold limits or manually by a Client request. System administrators configure these thresholds limits for applications in the cloud. When workload traffic spikes above the threshold, a connection request activates automatically which switches over to the public cloud and traffic pointed towards it. Once the workload traffic falls below the threshold, the application moves back to the private cloud or on-premises infrastructure.

Fig 1: Cloud Burst Reference Architecture

Business Benefits of Cloud Bursting

The Cloud Bursting solution creates unique opportunities for businesses and organisations. These include the capacity to:

• Deploy excess compute workloads to the cloud during peak activity

• Create a high performance and resilient compute environment

• Flexibly scale applications up and down beyond the private data-center or cloud when required

• Secure and accelerate business continuity plans both in the short and long term

• Utilise resources on pay-as-you-go basis with minimal service disruptions and lower costs

Types of Cloud Bursting Deployments

There are two major ways to deploy cloud resources for burst capacity:

• Dynamic scaling

• Spot instances

Dynamic Scaling:

In this type of cloud burst deployment, the cloud vendor adds or removes compute instances automatically as needed to meet demand. This can be scheduled or done in real time depending on the compute requirements.

Spot instances:

This involves the spot pricing of compute resources for burst capacity by bidding on them when demand is high and releasing them when demand drops. They are often available at a lower price than regular compute instances.

Cloud Bursting Strategies

There are 3 major digital transformation strategies that businesses and organizations can use to deploy cloud bursting solutions. They include:

• Automated bursting:

  This is an automatic bursting system which requires the organization to set automated thresholds to define how bursting is to be implemented. Once threshold limits are configured, a hosted application in a private cloud or datacentre can burst automatically over into a public cloud environment. Software defined applications with a control plane are used to switch over systemically. This enables the business to provision cloud resources precisely when needed without delay.

• Manual bursting:

  This is the manual provisioning and de-provisioning of cloud services and resources when increased compute traffic is expected. It is appropriate for the temporary deployment of high traffic workloads. It also helps to free up local data centre capacity for critical business applications.

• Distributed load sharing:

  This cloud bursting strategy involves the distributed load sharing of compute resources and applications between a public cloud and a data-center at the same time. When compute traffic hits its predefined threshold, a mirror environment redirects workloads to a public cloud. This cloud bursting architecture deploys applications locally and in the public cloud and load shares the workloads between both local and virtually hosted cloud deployments.

Compute considerations for Using Cloud Bursting

The baseline considerations required to be in place to deploy cloud bursting solutions are:

• Assess and set up your on-premises and cloud environments. This includes installing the required software and right sizing your compute instances.

• Decide which applications will be used for cloud bursting.

• Establish a pricing method for using the spot instances.

• Test your setup environment for performance.

When compute demand exceeds the capacity of a private cloud or datacentre, cloud bursting offers additional flexibility to deal with peaks in infrastructure demand. The advantage of a hybrid or multicloud deployment model like cloud bursting is that the business only pays for right-sized compute resources when they are needed.

Cloud Bursting Use Cases for Businesses

There are many distinct use instances for cloud bursting. Some of the most common use cases include:

• Capacity to handle unexpected traffic spikes:

  This is particularly evident in the retail sector where Cloud bursting provides a technology solution to handle sudden high traffic during peak shopping seasons. By using cloud resources for burst capacity, customer facing business websites stay up and running even when demand spikes.

• Supporting development testing environments and marketing campaigns:

  Manufacturers can leverage Cloud bursting solutions as an alternative testing environment for its software development and product marketing campaigns without impacting the capacity of its existing compute infrastructure and production costs.

• Meeting compliance requirements:

  This is relevant to businesses and Government Organizations where regulatory compliance is a requirement. Cloud bursting solutions is used to meet mandatory audits and compliance regulations for financial, health, defence and state infrastructure services. For example, many financial institutions are required to keep certain data backups off-site in order to meet regulatory guidelines.

• Archival and disaster recovery uses:

  By using the cloud for archiving or backup storage, businesses can easily comply with disaster recovery regulations without having to invest in extra storage capacity.

Constraints of Cloud bursting

Cloud bursting comes with challenges that can create deployment constraints if not mitigated. These include:

• Security:

  Cloud burst solutions leveraging the public cloud are high value targets which presents the risk of cyber attack from threat actors if sensitive organization data is not adequately secured.

• Resilient Data Storage:

  A highly available and durable storage is required to keep backups consistent when cloud burst solutions are deployed from multiple sources.

• Networking:

  Organizations need to architect a highly redundant, low latency and high performance compute environment to enable a resilient cloud burst solution between public and private clouds. Most constraints associated with cloud bursting are premised on the incompatibilities and limitations of cloud management tools within compute platforms and infrastructures.

However, Cloud service providers and vendors have developed open source tools to migrate workloads to the cloud, integrate and orchestrate hybrid and multi-cloud compute environments.

Conclusion

Cloud Bursting solution automates and orchestrates the deployment of mission critical business applications across both traditional and cloud infrastructures in a fast, consistent and automated manner while also managing the dynamic redirection of workloads to the most suitable location based on the needs of the business.

Organizations can leverage this transformation solution as a business continuity strategy both in the short and long term.