Capacity Planning¶

Capacity planning makes sure the service has enough resources for today's demand and a safe margin for tomorrow's.

Steps¶

1. Measure demand: requests per second, data growth, peak versus average.
2. Know the limits: load test to find where latency or errors start to climb.
3. Forecast: use growth trends and known events such as launches and sales.
4. Keep headroom: plan for peaks and for losing a node or zone (N+1).
5. Review regularly, and tie it to cost.

The USE method¶

For every resource (CPU, memory, disk, network), check:

• Utilization: how busy it is.
• Saturation: how much work is waiting.
• Errors: how often it fails.

Saturation is the early warning that utilisation alone hides.

Autoscaling on Kubernetes¶

Autoscaling reacts to load but does not replace planning. Limits, quotas and node supply still apply. See Requests, Limits and QoS.