Cloud Burst

Last Updated: July 11, 2012

Definition - What does Cloud Burst mean?

Cloud burst is a quality of service (QoS) metric used to gauge cloud solution scalability and measure software application capability and performance on hosted cloud platforms.

Cloud application and service vendors provide benchmark performance ratios for total leased infrastructure and ensure maximized application hosting. However, a well-designed, scalable, flexible and reliable architecture easily handles network traffic and computing requirements, while a poorly-designed architecture will falter when subjected to resource-hungry applications.

Also known as cloud bursting.

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Techopedia explains Cloud Burst

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.