Capacity Modeling at Scale
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Capacity Inputs
- Historical usage + peak patterns
- Growth forecasts
- Failover load requirements
- Platform overhead (daemonsets, logging, monitoring)
Operational Rules of Thumb
- Keep target utilization below a defined threshold
- Reserve capacity for incident response and failover
- Alert on approaching saturation early
Checklist: Before a Big Launch
- Confirm headroom (CPU/mem) in all regions - Confirm HPA/VPA policies - Confirm autoscaler limits and quotas - Run load test and validate SLOs - Prepare rollback and traffic shift plan
Failure Modes
- Autoscaler constrained by quotas → align quotas with scaling expectations.