Capacity Planning Language
6 exercises — express compute, storage, and database requirements, describe horizontal vs. vertical scaling, and present multi-year cost projections to stakeholders.
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Capacity planning vocabulary
- Clarify first: concurrent users vs. accounts; peak vs. average; target SLO
- Compute chain: rps ÷ pod capacity × HA factor = provisioned pods
- Storage chain: per-user data × users × growth × 3× replication = raw storage
- Horizontal (scale out): more same-size pods — preferred for stateless services
- Vertical (scale up): larger instance — limited by maximum available instance
- Name the bottleneck: "scales to N× today — at N+1× we need to shard [component]"
- Leadership translation: infrastructure → monthly cost → optimization path
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A product manager asks: "What do we need to support 10M users?" Which opening statement is most appropriate for a capacity planning discussion?
Option C — names the three clarifying questions needed before any estimate can be made, and specifies what the output will be (compute, storage, network).
Why clarifying questions come first in capacity planning:
• "10M users" is ambiguous: registered accounts vs. concurrent users are orders of magnitude apart
• Traffic pattern determines peak load calculations
• Target SLO determines redundancy requirements
• Without these, any number you give will be meaningless or dangerously wrong
Key clarifying questions in capacity planning:
• "Do you mean concurrent users or registered accounts?"
• "What's the expected request rate per user?"
• "What's the read/write ratio?"
• "What's the expected data size per user?"
• "What's our target SLO/uptime?"
• "What's the expected growth rate over the next 12 months?"
• "Are there geographic distribution requirements?"
Capacity planning vocabulary:
• "concurrent users" — users active simultaneously; the key metric for infrastructure
• "traffic pattern" — how load is distributed over time
• "peak load" — maximum concurrent users; typically 3–5× average
• "baseline load" — expected steady-state traffic
• "traffic shaping" — controlling how traffic enters the system
Why clarifying questions come first in capacity planning:
• "10M users" is ambiguous: registered accounts vs. concurrent users are orders of magnitude apart
• Traffic pattern determines peak load calculations
• Target SLO determines redundancy requirements
• Without these, any number you give will be meaningless or dangerously wrong
Key clarifying questions in capacity planning:
• "Do you mean concurrent users or registered accounts?"
• "What's the expected request rate per user?"
• "What's the read/write ratio?"
• "What's the expected data size per user?"
• "What's our target SLO/uptime?"
• "What's the expected growth rate over the next 12 months?"
• "Are there geographic distribution requirements?"
Capacity planning vocabulary:
• "concurrent users" — users active simultaneously; the key metric for infrastructure
• "traffic pattern" — how load is distributed over time
• "peak load" — maximum concurrent users; typically 3–5× average
• "baseline load" — expected steady-state traffic
• "traffic shaping" — controlling how traffic enters the system
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