Cloudbursting - squeezing the performance out of the cloud

One of the terms associated with cloud computing at the moment is Cloudbursting.

Using current cloud computing models for handling all of your applications and traffic can be costly, and using it for handling the peaks in your usage patterns can also be fraught with problems because of the time required to get the system set up and seeded with the information. Ramping up in the cloud is difficult since it may take minutes to fire up more hosts but your peak requirement may last less time than that.

Cloudbursting is about using your existing infrastructure in combination with some form of cloud computing, like Amazon's EC2 to provide the scalability in other areas when you need it. For example, in Cloudbursting - Hybrid Application Hosting they talk about using EC2 to help generate pages for a website that is then hosted on their data center.

This enables them to use the power and flexibility of the cloud as an extension to their existing infrastructure and do things they just couldn't do without purchasing a heap of hardware for what would be a relatively short period of time a few times a month.