Additionally, here is a great talk on queuing theory and load shedding. One argument this talk makes is that autoscaling is not the silver bullet you think it is (similar to queues).
Little's law reminds me of the Continuous Stirred-Tank Reactor model in chemical engineering. ChemEng has a lot of methods of modelling complex systems, that can be carried over to other domains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_stirred-tank_reacto...