CloudBursting: A Hybrid Approach to the Cloud

How can businesses leverage the cloud without losing the comfort and control of in-house data center operations? Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr says many companies are following a middle path that combines the best of both worlds. Jeff has coined a term for this hybrid approach: cloudbursting ^[1].  

Jeff defines cloudbursting as “an application hosting model which combines existing corporate infrastructure with new, cloud-based infrastructure to create a powerful, highly scalable application hosting environment.” Here’s his description of how it works: 

A pattern is starting to emerge. The conservative side advocates keeping core business processes inside of the firewall. The enthusiasts want to run on the cloud. They argue back and forth for a while, and eventually settle on a really nice hybrid solution. In a nutshell, they plan to run the steady state business processing on existing systems, and then use the cloud for periodic or overflow processing.

This hybrid approach may not slow the interest in private clouds ^[2] that employ cloud computing concepts to run apps more efficiently in corporate data centers, but it will raise awareness of different ways to manage the risks and rewards presented by third-party clouds.

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Article printed from Data Center Knowledge: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com

URL to article: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/08/28/cloudbursting-a-hybrid-approach-to-the-cloud/

URLs in this post:

[1] cloudbursting: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/08/cloudbursting-.html

[2] private clouds: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/08/19/the-cloud-living-in-your-data-center/

[3] Rich Miller: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/author/richm/

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