I've heard this burst-to-cloud story for many years now - Paul Maritz pitched it heavily as the pillar of VMware's value/strategy when he took over there.
I've yet to ever see or hear of it properly executed in practice. I think it's a really hard thing to try and bolt on to a legacy system, and if you build a new ground-up app this way going full cloud to start is easy and cheap for a while until you're successful and then the economics are.. complex.
I think there's also the weird angle to it that the folks who have the skill to architect apps like this are very hard to come by.
Would love to be proven wrong and hear about folks who've seen burst-to-cloud work out in practice though!
> I've yet to ever see or hear of it properly executed in practice.
Isn't Netflix the poster child for this, and haven't they been for a very long time now? Not the content, which resides in their and others CDNs, but the back-end, webservers, databases and management systems are all supposed to be in the cloud now (after a long time migrating).
> I think it's a really hard thing to try and bolt on to a legacy system
There are different levels. Architecting a sharded database solution before you need to might be a bit excessive, but designing for multiple web, storage, or processing servers, etc from the start even if using bare metal is smart, and allows (relatively) easily adding capacity even if you are just colocating somewhere. At the point where you are already able to add capacity by scaling hardware, the cloud is a fairly attractive target, especially since automating the steps you take to add/remove hardware is likely trivial if you've already been doing it manually for a while, as the rough edges have likely been smoothed away somewhat already..
Netflix is not a good example for one big reason: their cost of running servers is dwarfed by their other costs, possibly by two orders of magnitude. Netflix can and does waste money on servers.
I've yet to ever see or hear of it properly executed in practice. I think it's a really hard thing to try and bolt on to a legacy system, and if you build a new ground-up app this way going full cloud to start is easy and cheap for a while until you're successful and then the economics are.. complex.
I think there's also the weird angle to it that the folks who have the skill to architect apps like this are very hard to come by.
Would love to be proven wrong and hear about folks who've seen burst-to-cloud work out in practice though!