In this section you will learn how to plan the capacity of your CloudBlue Commerce installation.
General Principles
These are the general principles to remember during capacity planning:
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Capacity planning is an iterative process. It is not a one-time action. It starts before you deploy your CloudBlue Commerce installation and continues throughout the entire life of your installation.
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As your CloudBlue Commerce installation evolves and the demand for your services changes, you must periodically compare the current resource usage with reasonable thresholds and adjust the capacity of your installation accordingly.
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You must have a strategy of capacity planning that defines when and how much you need to change the capacity of your installation. You can learn more about this in this section.
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Decisions that you make based on the data you gather on a CloudBlue Commerce installation can be applied to that particular installation only.
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The results that you receive after every iteration of capacity planning are estimations. Do not expect them to be 100 percent accurate.
The Main Steps of Capacity Planning
Capacity planning is a continuous process that consists of three iteratively repeated steps:
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Analyzing: In this step, you review the resource usage statistics you gathered on your installation, analyze trends, and identify bottlenecks.
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Planning and Acting: In this step, based on the results of the previous step and your strategy, you decide which amounts of which resources you need to allocate, define new thresholds, and change the capacity of your installation accordingly.
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Monitoring: In this step, you monitor the resource usage on your installation and gather resource usage statistics. You compare your resource usage metrics with the thresholds that you defined in the previous step. As soon as these thresholds are reached, you start a new iteration of capacity planning.
These phases are considered in more detail in Use Cases of Capacity Planning.