Cloud capacity management is a key part of an effective IT strategy. The objective of capacity planning is to specify the overall capacity level of cloud resources, so you can more effectively improve service performance, increase agility, and reduce cloud costs.
Unlike traditional data center capacity planning, when you use Google Cloud, you cede most capacity planning to Google. Using the cloud means you don’t have to provision and maintain idle resources when they aren’t needed. For example, you can create, scale up, and scale down virtual machine (VM) instances as needed. Because you pay for what you use, you can optimize your spending, including excess capacity that you only need at peak traffic times.
Cloud capacity planning not only ensures workloads have the required resources, but also reduces the cloud bill due to overprovisioned workloads.
The following are the key business benefits of effective capacity planning:
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Cost reduction: Strategic cloud capacity planning helps IT anticipate and plan for potential business changes that can impact cloud resource management. When IT understands business priorities and plans, they can control, track, and adjust resource capacity, consumption, and any related budgets or quotas accordingly, which can all have an impact on your bottom line.
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Performance improvement: Poor application performance can lead to poor user experiences, and even customer churn. IT can help avoid this by uncovering and fixing the performance bottlenecks from systems and applications as part of strategic cloud capacity planning. Additionally, it enables IT to make more informed decisions on how to achieve optimal performance in a cost effective way.
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Flexibility and agility: Access to historical data and usage patterns - as part of effective cloud capacity planning - enables IT to effectively plan for unforeseen spikes in demand without disrupting the business.
Strategic cloud capacity planning can be explained using a four-step approach:
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Evaluate the capacity requirements for your workloads to achieve optimal performance in a cost-effective manner.
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Review infrastructure utilization metrics to understand the historical usage patterns and potential capacity needs.
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Strategize your capacity planning by creating an enterprise process to adjust capacity based on informed sources (e.g. business stakeholders)
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Ensure your quotas match your capacity requirements.
By creating strategic cloud capacity planning, enterprise IT can ensure optimal capacity for production workloads by adjusting capacity based on anticipated capacity demands.
The Google Cloud Architecture Framework describes in detail how to evaluate and plan your capacity and quotas in the cloud. Have questions about capacity planning? Please add your questions or insights as a comment below. We’d love to hear from you.
The Google Cloud Architecture Framework provides recommendations and describes best practices to help architects, developers, administrators, and other cloud practitioners design and operate a cloud topology that’s secure, efficient, resilient, high-performing, and cost-effective.