“Never” is way too strong. This technique is called “cloud bursting” and is done often enough to have docs on Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resource

“Never” is way too strong. This technique is called “cloud bursting” and is done often enough to have docs on Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/cloud-computing-dictionary/what-is-cloud-bursting/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/cloud-computing-... More generally, hybrid on/off prem (or multi-cloud) is a top level feature of GCP’s Anthos. You’re not wrong about your two main reasons, and it’s true that it’s hard to wire up. But you definitely can wire up hybrid workloads in some cases. The obvious one would be stateless batch compute like image/video processing; “I prefer to re-encode my videos on prem but can burst to the cloud if I get a traffic spike”. This might end up being cheaper than either of all-on-prem with overcapacity, or all off-prem with auto scaling. I agree it’s not likely to be useful for something where security is your reason for going on-prem.