Capacity management

Hi ! Today I want to write about capacity management.

Introduction

Capacity management is the act of ensuring a company maximises its production output. Capacity planning defines the process by which an organisation can establish current and future processing needs. Implementing capacity management may also entail working overtime, outsourcing business operations, purchasing additional equipment, and leasing or selling commercial property. The important thing about capacity planning is that infrastructure is flexible to meet changing demands, this is easily demonstrated in the case of cloud computing, in which the computation capacity of a platform adapts to the computation demand.

Capacity Management Best Practices

Since we know capacity management includes a robust network of rotating processes, any digital entity looking to go it alone should be comfortable with some basic best practices. These are as follows:

Continuous Planning

The main idea with continuous planning is to make the capacity management in an agile fashion. The opposite approach will be to plan for a yearly, monthly, etc planning.

An important benefit of continuous planning is that it makes capabilities and available resources more visible, allowing businesses to meet new demands on the fly instead of waiting for the next scheduled planning session to increase productivity. This can also help to prioritise certain tasks and operate in a more efficient way.

Workload Scenarios

The goal of the scenarios is to make sure the capacity is properly planned. This is specialty important on IT systems. Some of the performance that can be tested on those systems are: performance needed on the peak hour, performance needed if growth rate is X during Y years, etc.
It’s important to tailor these questions in the planning process to meet the unique qualities and specifications of your business.

Workload Analytics

In addition to coming up with scenarios about future workloads, it’s also important to examine how your current workloads function and how efficient they are at present and at peak times. This is called workload analytics.
This process can be viewed as a QA of the platform, to make sure the current capacity is correct.

The end

I hope you find this topic interesting. Capacity planning is an important aspect of IT projects, that it is usually postpone. When writing this blog post I found a lot of useful insights on how to capacity planning should be done.
Tell me what you think !