The C-Suite likes to think of cloud bursting like the magic waistband on my Thanksgiving pants — it dynamically expands to support me as I consume more and retracts once things return to business as usual. We all know that the pants don’t magically hide my Thanksgiving glut, (and I’ll need to do some extra miles to work it off). Yet, the myth exists that there are no similar challenges when it comes to cloud bursting. While the cloud offers a myriad of benefits for HPC workloads, cloud bursting is often not the best path to achieve them. In today’s article I’ll walk you through why that’s the case and share in conclusion the best path to achieving cloud upside.
The Origin of the Myth
Most HPC shops have a target CPU utilization against which they manage capacity. There’s a capacity planning process wherein the grid team collects internal customer CPU demand roadmaps for the next 6-12 months and then they rationalize that demand against their budget. It’s usually a lengthy, labor-intensive process that in the end yields utilization graphs like this: