Capacity Planning
Estimating future resource needs based on current usage trends and expected growth. Answers questions like 'how many servers do we need for 10x traffic in 6 months?'
What is Capacity Planning?
Estimating future resource needs based on current usage trends and expected growth. Answers questions like 'how many servers do we need for 10x traffic in 6 months?'
Capacity Planning is a advanced concept that sits in the Reliability & Resilience area of system design. Engineers reach for it whenever they need to reason about real-world trade-offs in that space — not just for textbook correctness, but because real production systems at companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google make these decisions every day.
If you want to go deeper than this definition — with diagrams, code, and a quiz to lock it in — work through the "Capacity Planning" lesson linked below. It walks through the why, the mechanism, the trade-offs, and how the giants actually use it in production.
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Full interactive lesson with diagrams, code examples, real-world references, and a quiz.
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Related glossary terms you might want to look up next.
Auto Scaling
Automatically adding or removing compute instances based on current demand. Scales out during traffic spikes and scales in during quiet periods to save cost.
Metrics
Numerical measurements collected over time that describe system behavior: request rate, error rate, latency percentiles, CPU utilization. Prometheus is the standard collector.
Throughput
The number of operations a system can handle per unit of time. Think of it as how many cars a highway can move per hour.