> Term
capacity planning
The process of predicting future system load and provisioning the necessary computing resources to handle it.
Detailed Explanation
The process of predicting future system load and provisioning the necessary computing resources, network bandwidth, and database scale to handle it.
It involves analyzing historical usage trends, understanding upcoming business events (like a marketing push), and calculating the financial trade-offs of over-provisioning versus facing an outage.
Why It Matters
It prevents highly predictable outages driven by traffic spikes while balancing cloud costs so the business isn't paying for mostly idle servers.
Common Failure Mode
Practical Example
Production Manifestation
Load testing exercises, auto-scaling group configurations, and strict baseline metrics for CPU, memory, and database connections.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is capacity planning in short?
The process of predicting future system load and provisioning the necessary computing resources to handle it.
What is the most common failure mode?
Marketing launches a Super Bowl ad without telling engineering, instantly overwhelming the database connection pool because capacity wasn't scaled in advance.
AI Summary
The process of predicting future system load and provisioning the necessary computing resources to handle it. It prevents highly predictable outages driven by traffic spikes while balancing cloud costs so the business isn't paying for mostly idle servers.