Cloud Capacity Part 2: Plan Your Consumption

Cloud CapacityIn the first part I presented some basic concepts and an overview of cloud capacity management. cloud capacity discussion has two main aspects:

  1. Infrastructure capacity management by the IaaS vendor to plan capacity of the cloud data-center to optimize utilization and decrease operations costs.
  2. Cloud resources consumption by the cloud consumers  (any IT organization such as a SaaS vendor) including planning capacity demand in order to achieve efficient consumption of the purchased cloud resources. In this part I will discuss this aspect.

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The Basics of Cloud Capacity

Cloud CapacityThe IT capacity plan is derived from the current and future resources utilization for holding, storing and accommodating the software services. It is a given fact that servers’ average utilization in the traditional data center is between 5% and 20%. By contract, when planning capacity in the cloud, the basic working assumption is that, utilization should match the demand at all times and support temporary demand peaks and future trends.
Capacity planning is described by Wikipedia as the

“process of determining the production capacity needed by an organization to meet changing demands for its products.” It is also given by the following formula:
(number of machines or workers) × (number of shifts) × (utilization) × (efficiency)

In his CIO’s article about cloud computing capacity, Bernard Golden wrote,
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Scale IT and Make Your Cloud Capacity Meets Demand

Capacity vs demandThe practice of shaping demand to fit the available resources can be found for example in transportation businesses, where airlines charges more for their service when demand is high and charge less to encourage more demand. In the real-time and interactive on-line world,  the challenge is to ensure that capacity meets demand.
The following diagram shows 3 cases of over capacity, under capacity and on demand capacity, which the latter can be achieved only by taking an advantage of the cloud elasticity.
IT systems or applications have capacity limitations. Sometimes a new SaaS web application works well in its first phase on the air as it serves from tens up to a maximum of several hundreds of users. In this stage, there will be no need to worry about a scalable hosting environment and paying a flat fee for the fixed computing resources makes sense. Over time as the SaaS product matures, the amount of users increases and the overall usage goes up. The SaaS vendor will have to deal with these scalability challenges and hopefully without the service suffering from poor performance. So what are the options to maintain the application’s availability with the new demands? Or in other word how do we scale it?
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