Cloudera’s cloud bursting capability brings the cloud to your data
The conversation around cloud adoption has matured significantly. For modern data-driven organizations, it’s no longer a question of if they should use the cloud, but how they can strategically blend public cloud agility with the security and control of their on-premises infrastructure.
Although the hybrid cloud market is projected to grow to over $300 billion by 2030, many organizations are hitting a wall. They’re discovering that simply connecting an on-premises data center to a public cloud doesn't create a truly hybrid platform.
Instead, they’re often forced into a lift-and-shift cycle: permanently relocating applications and continually replicating massive datasets to the cloud just to get temporary compute capacity. This leads to fragmented management, rising costs due to data duplication, and data staleness.
The Problem: How to Handle Data Spikes
Scalability is a top priority for enterprises. Businesses frequently face sudden spikes in data volume that require additional resources—whether it's end-of-month reporting, model training, or seasonal traffic.
Resource contention during these spikes creates bottlenecks that force organizations to miss critical service level agreements or objectives (SLAs and SLOs), which can result in potential regulatory fines and increased customer churn.
Historically, IT leaders had two imperfect choices to handle these spikes:
- Over-provisioning: Buying costly on-premises hardware that sits idle most of the time to account for peak demand
- Migration: Moving data and workloads to the cloud permanently, which is complex, risky, and fraught with compliance risks
The Solution: Bring the Cloud to Your Data
Unlike the traditional lift-and-shift model, Cloudera’s approach brings the cloud to the data.
Cloudera’s cloud bursting capability enables organizations to extend the private data center into a public cloud—only when needed—and scale back down when the demand subsides. This approach instantly bridges resources to handle demand without the risk or cost of data migration.
Here’s how it works:
Spin up a Hybrid Data Hub in the public cloud. This temporary compute cluster combines cloud elasticity with secure access to your on-premises data to handle heavy workloads (for example, a Spark job).
This cloud workload reads and writes directly from on-premises storage (such as Hadoop Distributed File System, or HDFS), intelligently fetching only the precise data subset required for the specific task rather than moving entire datasets.
Once the job is done, the cloud resources spin down. Your data is never replicated to the cloud; it is read only into memory and stays safely on-premises.
Why This Approach Changes the Game
By using Cloudera’s cloud bursting capability, built on its unified runtime and hybrid control plane, organizations can finally achieve workload portability without the rewrite. Benefits include:
Zero Data Migration
This architecture eliminates the cost and complexity of application redesign and massive data migration. Organizations don't need to create and maintain a copy of their data in the cloud just to run a query. Data that is out of sync remains with the original copy before the process is even completed. To optimize performance, the system uses advanced techniques like projection pushdown and partition pruning. This guarantees high-performance query results without the latency or cost of moving massive datasets.
Centralized Security and Governance
One of the biggest barriers to hybrid adoption is security. With Cloudera, the security context moves with the workload. We establish a two-way cross-realm trust between on-premises Active Directory and the cloud, which guarantees that the user submitting the job in the cloud is authorized by the same policies defined in Ranger on-premises. All metadata and governance rules remain centralized to maintain compliance with regulations like GDPR and HIPAA.
Strategic Workload Isolation and SLA Assurance
Resource contention on-premises often forces IT to play traffic cop, which is where they sometimes must delay lower-priority jobs to keep mission-critical ones running. Cloud bursting resolves this conflict. Organizations can now use strategic workload isolation to offload specific workloads to the cloud so they can maintain critical SLAs and SLOs for their core business processes. Whether it’s meeting a strict deadline for regulatory reporting or delivering real-time fraud detection without latency and ensuring performance without over-provisioning hardware can be guaranteed.
Real-World Application: Faster Time to Value
Imagine a data engineer working on a fraud detection model. The on-premises cluster is at 95% capacity, and a new threat vector requires immediate model retraining. Running this locally would choke the production pipeline and cause an SLA breach.
With Cloudera, that data engineer can:
Burst to the cloud in real time to access the necessary compute power
Process the sensitive data that lives on-prem without permanently moving it
Shut down the cloud instance immediately after the job completes
This capability also accelerates software development by enabling teams to create instant development environments that leverage zero-copy data access from their production on-premises source.
The Future is Cloud Anywhere
Cloudera is the only data and AI platform company that brings AI to your data anywhere it lives. Whether the data is in the data center, the public cloud, or at the edge, we deliver a consistent cloud experience that empowers you to make smarter, faster decisions.
Ready to bring the cloud to your data?
