Cloud Bursting

Organised By
Dr. Ashima Singh
Dr. Neenu Garg
 Cloud Bursting
Cloud bursting allows an organization to rent additional storage and
compute resources on demand.
Enabling organizations to avoid embarrassing and costly downtime without
spending money on resources that they don’t need for most of the year.

How to do it ?
1. An organization might run an application locally and then “burst”
another instance onto the public cloud during peak demand
2. The entire application can be moved to the public cloud to free
up local resources for other applications.
Which approach is best depends on several considerations:
Is the application configured to support multiple instances running at
the same time?
Can the application handle the increased latency that’s likely to
occur when running entirely from the public cloud?
 To Burst or Not to Burst?
● Difficult to accomplish at both the
infrastructure and application levels.
– Difficult to move storage to and from the cloud
● Bandwidth limitations
● Different environments aren’t always compatible.

● Software must be configured to run

multiple instances simultaneously
– The more complex your application and the more
services it interacts with, the more difficult it is to burst.
● Cloud bursting is usually recommended for
high-performance applications
– that
won’t suffer from the latency issues that come with
moving between the public and private cloud.
 Challenges
1. Creating and managing configurations for multiple different clouds.
– Differing underlying hypervisors and versions of hypervisors
– Cloud APIs
– Different clouds provide different ranges of virtual machine types and power
– Cloud network configurations differ. Some offer the concept of availability zones,
others do not. Some have security groups, some have subnets and ACLs, and
some have both.
– Clouds offer varying types of storage, such as object, block and persistent which
may exhibit differing behavior or may not be available in any other given cloud.

● Using different hypervisors and storage subsystems generally requires

using different base virtual machine images that need to be built for each
cloud and maintained with every operating system and security patch
that comes out.
● Help !! - RightScale (provides portability across clouds), RightScale
partners with Rackspace, which provides hybrid cloud solutions that use
OpenStack technologies for both the public and private cloud components.
 Challenge 2: Communication Latency
● Latency and throughput can become a challenge if
your application needs to move a significant amount of
data between your application tier and database when
they are located in different clouds.
– especially when the communication is over the public Internet.
● Help !! -
– Cloud providers that host your private cloud colocated with
their public cloud, such as Rackspace, SoftLayer, and
Logicworks.
– Data centers from companies such as CoreSite and Equinix
that offer the ability to connect dedicated private resources
using very high-speed cross-connects to multi-tenant public
cloud resources.
 Challenge 3: Handling Security
● Securing the communication path between the clouds, which
means setting up encrypted channels and dealing with the
inevitable routing issues, as well as compliance and audit
requirements.
● Depending on application availability requirements, these
communication channels may need to be redundant at every
level, which increases the routing complexity and adds a cost
multiplier to equipment and provisioned pipe costs.
● Help !!
– AWS offers VPN gateways to its VPCs (Virtual Private Clouds) to
handle encryption and some of the routing issues.
– Windows Azure also offers secure site-to-site communication
options.
– In addition, VNS3 from CohesiveFT and CloudOpt’s WAN Optimizer
can also be part of the solution.
 Application Portfolio Approach

● Rather than trying to make an application span

multiple clouds, just move entire applications.
– All
the servers for an application are located in one
cloud - either the private cloud or the public cloud -
and there is no communication between the clouds
● By cloudbursting entire applications,
– You don’t have multiple configurations to manage
– Communication needs are greatly reduced (or even
eliminated altogether),
– Overall architecture is greatly simplified.
 Service-Oriented Approach
● An application can be separated into multiple,
unique, and loosely coupled services, and each can
run in different clouds.
● Each of these services can be accessed via a
protocol that is designed for some latency and
optimizes bandwidth, for example through a web
API.
● The services are designed to function
autonomously, such that they do not need to
share data other than through each service’s API.
● This greatly simplifies the integration of the various
services within the workload, allowing each service
to run on the cloud that is most appropriate.
 Hybrid Clouds by Cloud Providers
● Amazon is offering Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) datacenter.
– Customers can use a secured VPN tunnel to transfer computing
power and data resources from their own server farms to
Amazon’s farm.
● GoGrid is offering a “Datacenter Expansion Solution”
– Allows organizations to extend their datacenters by connecting
them with GoGrid’s cloud infrastructure via a secure 2-way
IPSEC VPN Tunnel.
– Service includes free F5 hardware load balancers, web servers,
database servers, virtual and physical infrastructure, cloud
storage, 1 Gbps Internet connection and off-site backup.
● Rackspace is offering “RackConnect”
–A combined traditional and cloud hosting solution that allows for a
centrally defined network security policy manager and increased
security over an encrypted VPN tunnel or a private link.
 List of design requirements for your bursting
services and applications:

● Must be designed for compatibility with the public

cloud provider(s) of choice
● Must be designed so that all or some portion can
be run in that chosen cloud provider
● Must be within acceptable performance tolerance
when servicing over the WAN.
● Must meet security and compliance regulations
while hosted in public cloud
 Services that Can Help
● Following companies offer solutions that work by
abstracting various parts of the cloud provisioning and
management process, removing a lot of the complexity
associated with setting up and managing cloud bursting.
– Turbonomic (Formerly VMTurbo)
– Bracket Computing
● Turbonomic emphasizes automating critical tasks like
load balancing and scaling, meaning it can figure out
when it’s cheaper to run a given workload on the public
cloud, execute the burst, and then bring it back.
● Bracket is designed for financial institutions,
emphasizing unified IT security controls, visibility, and
the ability to cloud burst using sensitive data.
 4 major challenges
1. Data sets :
– Most of today’s applications rely on a large set of data
to function properly.
– To work properly in the cloud, all the stateful data had
to be copied, too.
● would take hours (or days…), which meant significant
time overhead before being operational.
– Once the first set of data was transferred, the data
center and cloud would have to be re-synchronized to
address changes that took place after the initial
transfer.
– Then, the whole process had to happen in reverse
when the cloud capacity was no longer needed.
 Solution
● Velostrata software gives IT the unique power to
begin running their applications in the cloud on larger
instance types within minutes while data remains on-
premises.
● Any data changes made within the cloud instance are
kept in-sync with the production data on-premises.
● Providing a way to add compute power within the
cloud in minutes but without having to move all the
data first.
 4 major challenges

2. Application dependencies :
– Applicationsare installed across multiple VMs and
rely on other systems (like databases) to function
properly
– Require manual labor to identify the dependencies
and properly connect them within the cloud.
 4 major challenges

3. Cloud Location :
– Vendors like Amazon and Microsoft have cloud
regions all over the world.
– Provide low-latency access to any of their offices or
customers.
– Each region required some level of replication in
getting the actual workload there so that when it was
needed, it would be ready to go.
● That meant keeping multiple copies of the same app up-
to-date across multiple cloud regions.
 4 major challenges

4. Performance :
– Separating application components introduces
latency
– Making bursting virtually impossible for any
application that required reasonable speed for data
reads and writes.
– Ability to decouple compute from storage effectively is
required