Capacity Planning
Capacity planning is a systematic process for determining the production capacity needed by an organization to meet changing demands for its products or services. It involves forecasting future resource requirements, analyzing current capacity, and making strategic decisions to ensure that infrastructure, personnel, and systems can handle expected workloads efficiently and cost-effectively. This methodology is critical in IT, manufacturing, and service industries to prevent bottlenecks, optimize resource utilization, and support business growth.
Developers should learn capacity planning to design scalable systems, avoid performance issues, and reduce operational costs by aligning technical resources with business needs. It is essential when building applications with variable traffic (e.g., e-commerce sites during peak seasons), deploying cloud infrastructure, or managing data centers to ensure reliability and avoid over-provisioning or under-provisioning. This skill helps in making data-driven decisions for hardware, software, and staffing investments.