[jamesgolick]

The fundamentals of capacity planning do not change based on the magnitude of your data growth. Why would they?

We're mostly talking about looking at your data growth curve and extrapolating points in the future. Why would that become impossible just because the curve is steep?

[suhail]

Because we're not made of gold and we're a startup.

[jamesgolick]

If you weren't paying such an enormous premium for your hardware, you'd have a lot more cash. On a per-dollar basis, you're paying anywhere from 2-10x the price for computing power on the cloud, depending on which resource you look at (CPU, Memory, Disk IOPS, etc).

Seriously. Do the benchmarks.

[sanswork]

suhail like myself works in an industry where one partner turning on can 2-4x capacity requirements and 10 other partners won't change your traffic profile much at all. It's easy to say plan in advance for growth but when there is a lot of varience in your growth then this becomes a problem. You will often find yourself overspending for unused capacity or struggling to meet new capacity. If your growth is a smooth line then yes you can say it is easy to figure out. But not everyones growth follows such a simple line.