In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Dr Bruno Silva from The Francis Crick Institute in London writes that new cloud technologies will make the cloud even more important to scientific computing. “The emergence of public cloud and the ability to cloud-burst is actually the real game-changer. Because of its ‘infinite’ amount of resources (effectively always under-utilized), it allows for a clear decoupling of time-to-science from efficiency. One can be somewhat less efficient in a controlled fashion (higher cost, slightly more waste) to minimize time-to-science when required (in burst, so to speak) by effectively growing the computing estate available beyond the fixed footprint of local infrastructure – this is often referred to as the hybrid cloud model. You get both the benefit of efficient infrastructure use, and the ability to go beyond that when strictly required.”