[reedciccio]

Renting the hardware is not necessarily a cost-saving measure though: how much of the compute/storage capacity you have is sitting idle in your datacenter? That's the whole point of finops: you need to have full visibility into the usage of your infrastructure so you can optimize the spend.

[wffurr]

OP didn't say anything about cost saving but rather predictability.

[joana035]

Gosh, there is job title for capacity planning?

[reedciccio]

do capacity planners buy and sell capacity to scale up and down month to month? :)

[Gravityloss]

When does the need ever go down?

[jonfw]

If you're retail, it goes down after xmas. If you're a tax company, it goes down after may. If you sell a product, it goes down when you go long enough without releasing anything new

[jen20]

At night, often. For example, I have had a use case where we needed a 1000 node build farm during the day when developers were working, but only 50 at night. Machine learning jobs are another common source of workloads that need burst capacity.

[cortesoft]

What company has constant load 24/7/365?

[dcow]

I’m going to guess Visa.

[mateo411]

I'm sure they still see time of day effects, day of week effects, month of year effects.

[funcDropShadow]

It is not necessarily a cost-saving measure, but it can be in some cases. In a project I was involved with, we came to the conclusion that we would pay AWS every three month the cost of the hardware that we would by ourselfs. I am aware that AWS includes hosting and services. Nevertheless that is a very big difference.

[tomc1985]

Still amazing to me that keeping capacity in reserve is now demonized