The scenario describes a classic use case for cloud bursting. The company has an existing on-premises infrastructure (a private cloud) but needs the elasticity to handle peak demand without abandoning its current investment. A hybrid cloud model integrates the existing private cloud with a public cloud. This allows the application to scale out, or "burst," into the public cloud to access additional resources when traffic spikes, and scale back down when demand subsides. This approach directly addresses the crashing issue, allows for future growth, and preserves the value of the on-premises data center.

B. edge: Edge computing is an architecture that moves computation closer to the data source to reduce latency, which is not the primary problem described.

C. private cloud: The company is already operating in a private cloud model (its local data center), which has proven insufficient to handle the peak load.

D. public cloud: Migrating entirely to a public cloud would solve the scaling problem but would violate the constraint of not discarding the existing investment.

1. Mell, P., & Grance, T. (2011). The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing (NIST Special Publication 800-145). National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Page 3, Section 2: Defines Hybrid Cloud as "a composition of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting for load balancing between clouds)." This directly supports the use of a hybrid model for handling load spikes.

2. Cisco. (n.d.). What Is Hybrid Cloud?. Cisco.com.

Section: "How does a hybrid cloud work?": "A hybrid cloud is a computing environment that connects a company’s on-premises private cloud and a third-party public cloud into a single, flexible infrastructure... An organization might run a workload on-premises, but use cloud bursting to access additional computing resources from the public cloud when there is a spike in demand." This aligns perfectly with the scenario's requirements.

3. Armbrust, M., et al. (2009). Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing (Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2009-28). University of California, Berkeley.

Page 6, Section 3.1: Discusses the benefit of cloud computing for handling variable usage patterns, stating, "This pay-as-you-go model allows startups to pay for exactly what they use... and established companies to handle 'peak loads' without having to provision for the peak." The hybrid model applies this principle by using the public cloud specifically for these peak loads.