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Cloud Bursting: The rise of hybrid clouds

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA: In the past, it was only small and medium businesses (SMBs) that adopted public clouds. Now, we see a change in trend with larger companies adopting public clouds as well.

In spite of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) growing at a CAGR of 135 per cent as compared to PaaS at 54 per cent and SaaS at 14 per cent, there has been a tremendous growth in private cloud adoptions.

Also Read: 'Private cloud protects biz model of old IT players'

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Companies that have been extremely cautious (or over protective) about their data, have preferred a private cloud option as they either reside within an enterprise or in a dedicated set-up of an external data centre provider. 

Cloud computing is a growing trend which has become too strong to ignore. Private clouds have been a choice for companies with adequate provisioning available internally within the enterprise.

However, a combination of both public and private cloud is required when an enterprise decides not to invest further on hardware and has reached its provisioning capacity threshold. Once the private cloud starts (borrowing) provisioning from a public cloud, it forms a hybrid cloud.

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Also Read: Will cloud end up being the next IT silo?

This style of computing where a private cloud borrows from a public cloud is called Burst computing. The term borrowing is significant as the organisation that provisions resources from the external cloud can return it back after the usage.

Cloud Bursting is an approach to handle spikes in demand that overwhelm enterprise computing resources by acquiring additional resources from a cloud services provider. It’s a little like having unexpected houseguests and not enough beds for them to sleep in; some of them will have to be put up in a hotel.

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While such “peaking through the clouds” promises to maximise agility while minimising the cost, there’s a question regarding the data which is generated or is required by such distributed applications. 

There are several strategies for dealing with cloudbursts, each of which have different implications for cost, performance, and architecture.

With the hybrid cloud — a panacea of sorts is now available to companies that maintain a mix of both on-premise and off-premise cloud computing resources. This concept has steadily gathered steam over the last year and a half, and now appears poised to capture the minds, and wallets, of corporations in the next year.

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The hybrid cloud market is being addressed by large technology vendors as well as open-source software projects in what might be classified as the ultimate face-off between lock-in and unlock.

The large vendors (such as VMware, Microsoft and HP) have been busy enabling both enterprises and service providers with a range of virtualisation tools to deliver migration of virtual machines between the on-premise and off-premise infrastructure.

Even Amazon has started to focus on hybrid deployment models with its Virtual Private Cloud service, which has been positioned as “a secure and seamless bridge between a company’s existing IT infrastructure and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.”

On the other hand, there is another set of companies and open source software projects that are approaching the markets to provide on-premise and public cloud integration.

Eucalyptus, the best known in this category, provides an open-source software infrastructure for on-premise cloud computing. Eucalyptus includes the ability to work within VMware environments and provision resources to Amazon Web Services.

The author is leader of Emerging Technologies at PwC India.

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