How do you blend Capacity Planning with DevOps?

1 The benefits of blending capacity planning with DevOps

Blending capacity planning with DevOps can offer multiple advantages, such as reducing costs and waste by aligning resource allocation with demand, improving reliability and availability, increasing agility and innovation, and boosting customer satisfaction. This process ensures that your systems can handle peak loads without compromising on service quality or user experience. Additionally, it enables faster and more frequent deployments of new features and updates, as well as faster recovery from failures or incidents. Ultimately, this combination of strategies can help you deliver a consistent and high-quality service that meets or exceeds customer expectations and needs.

2 The challenges of blending capacity planning with DevOps

Blending capacity planning with DevOps also poses some challenges. For example, there is a need to balance the trade-offs between cost, performance, and quality, as well as between short-term and long-term goals. Additionally, managing the complexity and uncertainty of dynamic and heterogeneous environments is difficult. Communication and collaboration across different teams, roles, and stakeholders can be difficult due to different perspectives, incentives, and expectations. Lastly, it can be hard to measure and monitor the impact and value of capacity planning and DevOps initiatives using relevant metrics.

3 The best practices of blending capacity planning with DevOps

To overcome the challenges of blending capacity planning with DevOps and reap the benefits, it is best to adopt a customer-centric and data-driven approach. Leverage the cloud and automation to scale up and down resources using elastic scaling, load balancing, auto-scaling, and infrastructure as code. Additionally, integrate capacity planning into your DevOps pipeline by incorporating capacity testing, analysis, and optimization into CI/CD processes with performance testing, load testing, stress testing, and chaos engineering. Lastly, establish a culture of collaboration and learning where teams share information, insights, and best practices while learning from failures and successes using dashboards, reports, alerts, retrospectives, and post-mortems.

4 The examples of blending capacity planning with DevOps

To illustrate how you can blend capacity planning with DevOps in practice, here are some examples of companies that have done so successfully. Netflix uses the cloud and automation to scale its streaming service to millions of users, while experimenting with new features using canary releases, A/B testing, and chaos engineering. Spotify employs a microservices architecture and decentralized approach to capacity planning, where each team is responsible for managing its own resources and performance, while collaborating with other teams using squad health checks, peer reviews, and guilds. Etsy has a hybrid model of cloud and on-premise infrastructure to support its e-commerce platform and deploy code changes multiple times a day with feature flags, dark launches, and blameless post-mortems.

5 The next steps of blending capacity planning with DevOps

If you want to start or improve your journey of blending capacity planning with DevOps, you should assess your current state and identify any gaps and opportunities for improvement with the help of tools such as the Capacity Planning Maturity Model or the DevOps Assessment. Additionally, you should define goals and objectives for capacity planning and DevOps, utilizing tools like the SMART criteria or the OKR methodology. Furthermore, plan and execute your actions and initiatives with the aid of tools like the PDCA cycle or the Scrum methodology. Lastly, evaluate and improve your results and outcomes with tools such as the Balanced Scorecard or the Lean Startup methodology.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?