Capacity planning

Capacity Planning Skill

Setup Check

Before loading context files, check if context/CONTEXT.md exists in the current directory.

If context/CONTEXT.md exists — read it and proceed normally.

If context/CONTEXT.md does not exist — this skill was installed standalone (e.g. via npx skills add). Ask the user these questions before proceeding:

1. Role — junior-sre / senior-sre / sre-manager (shapes output depth and tone)
2. Cloud provider — aws / gcp / azure / on-prem / hybrid
3. Observability stack — e.g. Datadog, Prometheus+Grafana, New Relic
4. Company name and primary services affected (if relevant to this task)

Use the answers inline for this session. For persistent setup across all skills, suggest:

pipx install sre-agent
sre-agent init

Instructions

Step 1: Load Context

Read context/CONTEXT.md and context/company/tech-stack.md for cloud provider, container platform, and company stage.

Step 2: Gather Current Baseline

Ask the user for (or help them find):

• Current resource utilization: CPU %, memory %, storage, network throughput
• Current traffic: RPS at P50 / P95 / P99 / peak
• Current pod/instance counts per service
• Autoscaling configuration (min, max, target utilization)
• Cost baseline (monthly cloud spend)

Step 3: Project Growth

Choose the appropriate growth model:

Linear growth model (steady, predictable business)

projected_traffic = current_traffic × (1 + monthly_growth_rate)^months

Exponential growth model (early startup, high growth)

projected_traffic = current_traffic × growth_multiplier^quarters

Event-driven model (product launch, seasonal peak)

peak_traffic = baseline_traffic × peak_multiplier
# Common peak multipliers: 2x (normal launch), 5x (viral launch), 10x (major campaign)

Ask the user:

• What is the expected monthly traffic growth rate?
• Are there any planned events (launches, campaigns, partnerships) that will spike traffic?
• What is the planning horizon (3 months, 6 months, 1 year)?

Step 4: Identify Bottlenecks

For each resource dimension, calculate when it hits its limit:

Time to limit = (limit - current_value) / monthly_growth_rate

Example:
  CPU: currently at 45%, limit at 80% (with autoscaling headroom)
  Monthly traffic growth: 15%
  CPU grows proportionally to traffic
  Months to limit: (80 - 45) / (45 × 0.15) = 5.2 months

Bottleneck analysis table:

Resource	Current	Limit	Growth Rate	Months to Limit
CPU	45%	80%	15%/mo	5.2 months
Memory	60%	85%	12%/mo	2.1 months ← FIRST BOTTLENECK
Storage	30%	90%	8%/mo	7.5 months
Network	20%	80%	20%/mo	3.0 months

Step 5: Sizing Recommendations

For each bottleneck, provide concrete recommendations:

Kubernetes / containers:

• Adjust resource requests and limits
• Increase max replicas in HPA
• Evaluate cluster node count and instance types
• Consider vertical pod autoscaling for memory-bound services

Databases:

• Read replica count for read-heavy scaling
• Connection pool sizing
• Instance class upgrade timeline
• Sharding consideration for write-heavy growth

Caching:

• Cache hit rate improvement (reduce origin load)
• Cache cluster sizing

Step 6: Capacity Timeline

Produce a month-by-month action plan:

Month 1: Increase memory limits for payment-api (bottleneck at current rate)
Month 2: Add 5 nodes to prod EKS cluster (before projected limit)
Month 3: Upgrade RDS instance class (replication lag increasing)
Month 4: Add read replica for user-service DB
Month 6: Evaluate sharding strategy for orders table (projected 500GB)

Step 7: Cost Projection

Estimate cost of recommended capacity changes:

Change	Monthly Cost Impact	One-Time Cost
5 additional EKS nodes (m5.xlarge)	+$1,200/mo	—
RDS instance upgrade (db.r6g.2xlarge)	+$800/mo	—
Additional read replica	+$600/mo	—
Total	+$2,600/mo	—

---

Guidelines

• Always include a "do nothing" scenario to show the cost of inaction (incident, degradation).
• Build in a 30% headroom buffer beyond projected peak — forecasts are always wrong.
• Autoscaling is not infinite: always check max replica counts and node pool limits.
• Persona (sre-manager): include team bandwidth to execute the capacity plan and whether hiring is needed to manage increased infrastructure complexity.