Reuven Cohen's "ElasticVapor" Blog

How do you effectively enable a kind of cloud overflow in a secure yet efficient manner?

Jeff Barr from Amazon Web services has come up with a great new term to describe the need to handle sudden and extreme spikes in demand by enabling a hybrid cloud computing model which combines both private data center resources and remote cloud resources such as Amazon EC2. He called this model "cloudbursting".

This term seems to be quickly becoming the preferred way to describe a major problem in the emerging cloud computing space - or for some the perfect "opportunity" (myself included).

In doing some research earlier I came across the original definition of a cloudburst. In meteorology a cloudburst is an extreme form of rainfall, which normally lasts no longer than a few minutes but is capable of creating flood conditions. Similarly in IT a sudden and unexpected rise in demand can quickly overwhelm a data center. In coming up with the term cloudbursting, Jeff has give a simple name to a rather complex problem. At Enomaly this is a problem we've been debating for awhile; How do you effectively enable a kind of cloud overflow in a secure yet efficient manner?

Provisioning instances in Amazon EC2 for example is relatively easy, moving live workloads across a wide area is not. In most modern dynamic applications the idea of having a "hot cloud standby" or a prebuilt virtual machine that is basically waiting in the wings would solve a lot of problems. But in reality there are a number of complexities that need to be overcome. These complexities range from network optimization to secure data transfer & replication to load balancing across geographically diverse hosting environments, just to name a few.

To truly enable a capable cloudbursting infrastructure, I feel there needs to be a common consensus on how this may be archived and by what means. So the question in the short term is: what are some of the practical approaches, technologies and architectures needed to make this kind of hybrid cloud infrastructure feasible?

Reuven Cohen is a member of the distinguished Speaker Faculty of SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo 2008 West. The event, being held in San Jose, CA, on 19-21 November 2008, is being keynoted by Dr Werner Vogels, VP & CTO of Amazon.com, who will be speaking about "The Power of Infrastructure as a Service" in a much-awaited presentation on November 20.

The Speaker Faculty includes:

Jonathan Bryce - Founder at Mosso (Rackspace) When Is The Right Time For Standards?	Omer Trajman - Director of Field Engineering, Vertica Systems Cloud Computing Meets Data Warehousing
Mike Feinberg - SVP, Cloud Infrastructure Group, EMC Trusting the Cloud: Timing and Adoption of Cloud Technologies	Patrick Harr - CEO, Nirvanix Cloud Storage: A Paradigm Shift in IT
Mike Eaton - CEO Cloudworks Marketing A Paradigm Shift	John Janakiraman - CTO, Skytap Cloud Adoption: Deploying Your Existing Applications to the Cloud
Billy Marshall - Founder & CEO, rPath On the Path to Cloud Nirvana	Nati Shalom - CTO, GigaSpaces Getting Ready for the Cloud
Stuart Charlton - Chief Software Architect, Elastra Infrastructure-as-a-Service Model of Early Cloud Computing	Javier Soltero - Co-Founder & CEO, Hyperic Clouds Are No Substitute for Competence
Reuven Cohen - Founder & Chief Technologist, Enomaly The World Wide Cloud: Bridging the Data Center and The Cloud	David Young - Co-Founder & CTO, Joyent The Open Cloud: Building a Customer-Centric Cloud Computer
Thorsten von Eicken - CTO & Founder, RightScale Deploying into the Clouds: Concepts, Benefits, and Experiences	Alan Williamson - Founder, Blog-city.com Walking Freely Among the Clouds
Dr. Rich Wolski - Professor, U.C. Santa Barbara An Open Source Cloud Computing Infrastructure Designed for Research and Development: Eucalyptus	Songnian Zhou - Co-Founder & CEO, Platform Computing Cloud Computing: Beyond the Buzz
Dave Durkee - Founder, CEO & Technical Director, ENKI Achieving 4 or 5 Nines in the Cloud	Kevin Haar - CEO, Appistry Simplifying Cloud Computing for the Enterprise
Peter Nickolov - President & CTO, 3Tera Solutions for Instant Disaster Recovery in the Cloud	Gordon Jackson - Technical Director, Univa UD Improving the Clouds - Raising the Bar For IT-as-a-Service
Kevin Gardner - Executive Chairman, SOASTA Load Testing: Cloud Computing's 'Killer App'?	John Keagy - Co-Founder CEO, ServePath SaaS in the Cloud
Gerrit Huizenga - Cloud Architect, IBM Private Clouds: Pay Attention to What is Behind the Curtain!	Rachel Chalmers - Research Director, The 451 Group The Storm Cloud of Innovation

Cloud Computing Technology Providers and Contributors in 2008-2009

The following companies are among the providers and contributors of Cloud Computing technology: 10Gen, 3Leaf, 3Tera, Absolute Performance, Accenture, Akamai, Amazon.com, Appirio, Appistry, Areti Internet, Boomi, Box.net, Canaan Partners, Cloud9 Analytics, CloudWorks, CNI Systems, CohesiveFT, CSRware, DataDirect, Dell, DNAmail, eBay, Elastra, EMC, EngineYard, Enki Consulting, Enomaly, Excelian, Flexiscale, Fortress ITX, Forum, GigaSpaces, GoGrid, Google, HP, IBM, IBRIX, Joyent, JumpBox, Layered Technologies, Level 3 Communications, Linxter, LongJump, MDV, Microsoft, Moka5 (MokaFive), Mosso, NewServers, Nirvanix, Ocarina Networks, OpSource, Panorama Software, Peer1 Networks, Pervasive Software, Platform Computing, PLX Technology, Qlayer, Rackspace, RampRate, Red Hat, RightScale, rPath, Salesforce.com, Saugatuck Technology, ServePath, Skills Matter, Skytap, SnapLogic, SOASTA, Sun Microsystems, Symphoniq, Symphony Services, Tap In Systems, Teneros, Terremark, Transitive Corporation, Univa UD, Verizon Business, Vertica, VMware, XCalibre, Zabovo.com, ZOHO and Zuora.