Week 3 - Capacity Limitations

  As with any form of modern technology, certain limits are placed on how far hardware goes. The same can be said about cloud computing. Although cloud computing resources are vast, they are not infinite. So, when a business decides to expand its resources through the cloud, the business must understand capacity limitations.

What exactly are capacity limitations? Well, it is just as it sounds. The cloud capacity limitations are the amount of resources that can be delegated to a given cloud model. As an example, there are 2 main limitation factors. There are CSP quotas / throtttles and Account owner caps. CSP quotas and throttles are limitations that services offer to ensure the stability of their cloud. If a customer requests for a large amount of resources to be used, it may throttle other customers' cloud experience and overload the service, thus causing issues. Account owner caps are self-imposed restrictions used to limit expenditures and expand cloud resources only based on the allowed budget. Lastly, as briefly mentioned, there are technological limits. The systems can only handle so much and as a result, even if the cloud resources could theoretically be allocated to a large number of customers for even larger amounts, the hardware limitation is eventually imposed pushing the technology to its limits. Because of this, businesses must do capacity planning to ensure that they get the most out of their cloud environment. Capacity planning is done by scaling.