Capacity Planning is sort of an art, but mostly maths. After being in the game for a while, you can start to sense the business demand trends and system loads, but that should be backed up by numbers.

There is an in-depth article written by Diego Ballona about Capacity Planning in the ByteByteGo blog showing how deep this subject can go.

However, from a wider picture point of view, Capacity Management can be looked at from economics lenses – as the demand for your service changes, what do you do with your supply? 

The book Data Science for Supply Chain Forecasting has some great content regarding forecasting the business demand, and is beginner friendly, however I have to agree with some criticism – you cannot foresee the future and forecasting cannot be relied on 100%. 

Therefore you need to learn how to jazz. As the situation dynamically changes, you need to adapt your system capacity. This is much easier if the systems are designed to be scalable, but like everywhere, there are always  constraints. I really liked the classic book about the constraints theory called The Goal if you would like to understand more about this topic. 

And if you would like to learn more about capacity planning, you could dig deeper into – The Art of Capacity Planning, which is focused more on Cloud systems, or you can take a look at more big enterprises, a.k.a. ITIL based book – A-Z of Capacity Management.