The process of determining the cloud resources needed to meet current and future workload demands while optimizing costs. Like planning how much food to buy for a growing family, capacity planning involves analyzing usage patterns, forecasting growth, and ensuring enough compute, storage, and network resources are available without over-provisioning. Cloud providers offer tools like AWS Compute Optimizer, Azure Advisor, GCP Recommender, and OCI Cloud Advisor to help right-size resources.
An e-commerce company analyzes their traffic patterns and discovers they need 3x more capacity during holiday seasons. They use auto-scaling groups with a baseline of 10 instances that can scale to 30 during peak periods, saving 60% compared to always running at peak capacity.
Each cloud provider offers advisory tools to help right-size resources and plan for future capacity needs.