Cloud bursting assumes you have a hybrid on-premises and cloud computing environment, which means that your applications can run across multiple data centers seamlessly. IT managers use network load balancers (also called application delivery controllers) in front of their application to spread the load across multiple application servers.
To make cloud bursting work properly, the application has to be hidden behind a load balancer and must be able to run correctly across different data centers simultaneously.
What Are the Challenges with Cloud Bursting Technologies?
Applications designed to benefit from cloud bursting can be complicated to manage, especially when back-end resources such as databases are involved.
In the K–12 environment, tools such as load balancers are more commonly deployed to provide high reliability, spreading service across multiple servers in a single data center. Load balancers can deliver a higher level of uptime because they keep applications running, even if one of the application servers is unavailable due to hardware problems or general software maintenance.
Spreading that kind of load balancing for an application portfolio across multiple data centers is an area where most K–12 IT teams have had little experience.
As K–12 IT managers move more and more applications to the cloud, mostly via Software as a Service environments such as Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, the requirement for performance management has largely disappeared. It’s not your problem to solve if Microsoft or Google are seeing a momentary slowdown.
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The few applications that K–12 IT teams still run on-premises are generally small and specialized — not the kind of apps that can easily be spread across multiple data centers or that need to scale up for increased load. This means K–12 IT managers might look at cloud bursting and think that this isn’t something they need to know about.
However, there are parts of cloud bursting that might be interesting to school IT teams.
How Can K–12 Schools Use Cloud Bursting for Applications?
One way schools can use cloud bursting is not for sharing application performance between on-premises and cloud data centers but as a tool to move applications entirely to cloud data centers — and back. In other words, when the load on an application starts to peak, IT teams can use cloud bursting technology to move the entire application from on-premises to a cloud data center. Rather than run a hybrid environment, run the application in one place or the other and use cloud bursting technology to quickly shift the application when needed.
A good example of this might be an application that sees heavy use at the beginning of each semester, such as scheduling or class registration software. When everyone wants to use it, cloud bursting can move the entire application to a cloud data center. For the other 48 weeks of the year, the application can continue to run in on-premises servers, saving money and making use of existing hardware resources.
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This kind of cloud bursting usually requires some application downtime. The key here is to make use of cloud bursting technology, such as dynamic scaling and load balancers, to shift the application even if it isn’t ready to operate in a hybrid model.
Another option for cloud bursting in K–12 environments is to use the technology to help IT teams make the shift from on-premises to cloud-based data centers. Most IT managers who have been through cloud migrations know that the marketing-friendly “lift and shift” isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds. Having the option to migrate an application slowly from on-premises to cloud-based services, using cloud bursting technology, can give IT teams confidence that they’ll be able to migrate applications smoothly, rather than exposing the user community to road bumps along the way.
Cloud bursting brings cloud resource scalability to on-premises applications. K–12 IT managers shifting their own applications to the cloud can use burst computing technology to ease their move and maintain high levels of service.
