3.4 Capacity Planning

Capacity Planning

Forecasting the resources needed to meet the demand for a particular service.

• Providing too few resources can cause slowdowns and outage

• Over-provisioning wastes money.

Goal is to balance supply and demand by having the right number of staff, using suitable technology, and building an infrastructure that supports current and future needs efficiently.

People

While technology plays a major role, the human element is equally important.

• For instance, a call center depends on people to answer calls and enter data into applications.

• Staffing can’t be easily scaled up or down quickly

• Hiring new employees takes time and money due to training needs.

• Having too many employees may require reallocating them to other departments or, in some cases, downsizing the workforce

Technology

Choosing technology that can scale easily with changing demand is crucial.

• Not every technology can grow or shrink efficiently, so planning for scalability early in the design process is important.

• For example, implementing multiple web servers behind a load balancer lets you add or remove servers invisibly as demand changes

• For databases, using multiple SQL servers or distributing data across smaller database segments helps handle varying loads.

• Cloud services offer near-limitless scalability, allowing you to increase resources quickly, but higher usage also means higher costs

Infrastructure

When building a new application, you must consider all necessary components such as storage, application servers, network connectivity, and any other required resources.

• In a physical data center, this involves purchasing hardware, shipping, unboxing, configuring, installing, testing, and deploying equipment, which is time-consuming.

• In contrast, deploying in the cloud is much simpler and faster—you can create new application instances with just a few clicks.