.NET Architecture & System Design Interview Question #193

What is capacity planning?

Deployment, Cloud Operations, SRE & Senior System Design Scenarios Senior Advanced

Quick Interview Answer

Capacity planning estimates the resources required to meet expected traffic, data growth, performance targets, and failure scenarios.

Detailed Explanation

Capacity planning estimates the resources required to meet expected traffic, data growth, performance targets, and failure scenarios.

It uses measurements such as requests per second, resource utilization, storage growth, concurrency, queue depth, and dependency limits. Plans should include headroom and should be validated through realistic load testing.

Code Example

Forecast:
users -> requests/sec
      -> CPU/memory
      -> DB connections
      -> storage
      -> network

Add headroom + failure capacity.