Load up your clouds just about right - need for capacity planning
Well, if I have compute and storage available on-demand then I would not worry about capacity planning,Right?
Wrong! Although Capacity planning has traditionally been a long term decision which extends over a time period long enough for enterprises to obtain resources.With the cloud's inherent on-demand nature, it has considerably shortened the acquisition lead times. However there are a few factors which makes capacity planning an important aspect to consider and that which should be kept in mind before venturing into the clouds.
1.Help IT better respond to business demands
After all cloud resources aren't free. Take the case of EC2 and Azure where you get charged the minute you deploy your application, even if the app is simply lying there in an unused/stopped state. Its important to understand the workload patterns that impact your business, so that cloud resources can be effectively provisioned and efficiently utilized. Aligning operations with workload usage can help manage the cloud deployments dynamically and thus leads to optimal usage of subscribed resources.for eg. automatically provisioning of additional instances during the festival season. The goal is to have IT to support business in real time, which helps the enterprise to gear up to changes in the business and adapt to those changes faster.
2. Benchmark deployments
To identify badly performing instances that are not performing up to expected SLA's. This is to avoid over provisioning on public clouds.
3. Aid design of application architectures
Analyzing usage workloads helps in design application architectures and size the app with the cloud supplied instances. Important design decisions based on performance and cost can be made. Capacity planning helps in arriving at the ROI of a proposed cloud solution.
4. Flexibile billing plans
Be informed on the future utilization of your resources so as to choose the billing plan that suits your need.In real life, its important that you keep your financials on check, even if the resources you purchase or utilize are perceived to be low cost eg: cell phone bills, utility bills etc... Same is the case in the virtual world and very relevant with the cloud!
5. Forecasting-
Provides the enterprise and CIOs with timely and strategic insights so they can not only utilise existing resources to the maximum, but also plan proactively for future needs.
As the financal year ends, it is a good time to take stock of your expenses and zero-in on where you overshot your mark due to improper capacity planning. Think about it, the next financial year you might have to deal with the cloud and the time is now to plan for the same.
