Cloud burst can be either a positive and negative phenomenon that defines a cloud infrastructure's ability to handle traffic and computing surges. A positive cloud burst refers to a cloud-based application or infrastructure platform that efficiently and capably manages cloud-hosted application scalability. A negative cloud burst refers to a cloud-based application or infrastructure's inability to efficiently manage resource requirements.

The term can also refer to a situation in a hybrid cloud where there is a burst of data and the application scales from the private to the public cloud. Cloud bursting in this sense has the same result -- the app performs -- it's just that the public cloud resources were used to accomplish the scalability.