Cloud bursting is the act of dynamically leveraging off-premise private or public compute resources in response to an increase in demand. Auto scaling is the act of dynamically adding local resources to a service in response to an increase in demand. Cloud bursting and auto scaling are bursting modes that can be triggered by an increase in demand. The resources consumed during cloud bursting or auto scaling are not explicitly dedicated to the service and are deallocated when the increase in workload normalizes.

Cloud bursting is an advanced topic that is rapidly evolving. This guide examines design guidelines, theory, and early technical insights developed to help address emerging use cases related to building an auto scaling infrastructure. The focus of this guide is specifically on the infrastructure components of auto scaling, so the document does not address the application and end-user layer implications of an auto scaling infrastructure.