Guerrilla capacity planning: A tactical approach to planning for highly scalable applications and services

Abstract

In these days of shortened fiscal horizons and contracted time-to-market schedules, traditional approaches to capacity planning are often seen by management as tending to inflate their production schedules. Guerrilla Capacity Planning facilitates rapid forecasting of capacity requirements based on the opportunistic use of whatever performance data and tools are available in such a way that management insight is expanded but their schedules are not. A key Guerrilla concept is tactical planning through the introduction of short-range capacity planning questions in team meetings, which compels management to buy into capacity planning. Once you have your "foot in the door", capacity planning methods can be refined in an iterative cycle of improvement called "The Wheel of Capacity Planning". Another unique Guerrilla tool is Virtual Load Testing, based on Dr. Gunther's "Universal Law of Computational Scaling", which provides a highly cost-effective method for assessing application scalability. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007. All rights are reserved.