In the early 2000’s when the IT world was in the throes of ERP, CRM, SFA and e-commerce, IT infrastructure was invariably designed to support the absolute worst-case scenario. I quickly learned there were two options when launching any self-serve solution: it either flat-lines or takes off like a rocket—there is no in-between.
The capacity planning challenge drove the development of grid computing, then virtualization, and finally cloud computing. Although with cloud we now have a way to rapidly scale up to meet increasing demand, it seems we have forgotten scaling down to conserve resources is equally important.
