Assessments - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 429

A.4 Capacity Planning (CP)
Capacity Planning covers determining future resource needs. All services require some
kind of planning for future resources. Services tend to grow. Capacity planning involves
the technical work of understanding how many resources are needed per unit of growth,
plus non-technical aspects such as budgeting, forecasting, and supply chain management.
These topics are covered in Chapter 18 .
Sample Assessment Questions
• How much capacity do you have now?
• How much capacity do you expect to need three months from now? Twelve
months from now?
• Which statistical models do you use for determining future needs?
• How do you load-test?
• How much time does capacity planning take? What could be done to make it easi-
er?
• Are metrics collected automatically?
• Are metrics available always or does their need initiate a process that collects
them?
• Is capacity planning the job of no one, everyone, a specific person, or a team of ca-
pacity planners?
• If there is a corporate standard practice for this OR, what is it and how does this
service comply with the practice?
Level 1: Initial
• No inventory is kept.
• The system runs out of capacity from time to time.
• Determining how much capacity to add is done by tradition, guessing, or luck.
• Operations is reactive about capacity planning, often not being able to fulfill the
demand for capacity in time.
• Capacity planning is everyone's job, and therefore no one's job.
• No one is specifically assigned to handle CP duties.
• A large amount of headroom exists rather than knowing precisely how much slack
is needed.