A critical component of event readiness is capacity planning, where you determine the amount of cloud resources needed to ensure your workloads have what they need to operate effectively, without over provisioning and paying unnecessarily for what you don't need.
Capacity is the total amount of a particular resource that's available, shared across all customers. However, to ensure that a few customers or projects can't monopolize resources, Google Cloud restricts how much of a particular shared Google Cloud resource that you can use with quotas.
Each quota represents a specific countable resource, such as API calls to a particular service, the number of VMs used by your project at a given time, the number of load balancers used concurrently by your project, or the number of projects that you can create.
While many services have default quotas for some resources, the quotas that apply to your applications are specific to you, your project, or your organization. Enabling billing for your project increases quotas for most services. Quotas can also increase as your use of Google Cloud expands over time.
As you're preparing for your high traffic event or peak season, you need to ensure that your quotas match your resource requirements so that you don't encounter unexpected failures.
We recommend that you do the following:
Use Cloud Monitoring tools to get visibility into your application usage and capacity, and the overall health of your applications and infrastructure.
Evaluate the average and peak utilizations of your top cloud workloads, and their current and future capacity needs, to determine how much over-provisioning is needed to prepare for traffic spikes.
Run load tests to determine how much load the system can handle while meeting its latency targets, given a fixed amount of resources.
Use Capacity Planner
Capacity Planner lets you view historical and forecasted usage of your virtual machine (VM) instances, Persistent Disk volumes, and GPUs. You can also view reservations, reserve resources in advance, and manage your project's quota limits by seeing how close you are to your limit, and setting up automatic quota increase requests. For more information, see View usage and forecast data in Capacity Planner.
Enable the quota adjuster
The quota adjuster monitors your resource consumption and proactively submits quota adjustment requests on your behalf so that you don't have to make manual requests. For more information, see How the quota adjuster works.
Request a quota adjustment
If your quotas aren't sufficient for what you need, you can request a quota adjustment. There are three primary ways to submit a quota increase request:
- Through the Google Cloud console
- Through a support case
- Directly with your account team or TAM
If you need a quota increase request addressed quickly, you should consider using the Google Cloud console. However, if the request requires more analysis, you might need to work with your account team.
To adjust a quota value through the Google Cloud console, see View and manage quotas.
Most quota increase requests are evaluated by automated systems. Their decision is based on criteria including the availability of resources, the length of time you've used Google Cloud, and other factors. Requests that don't meet the criteria are denied. If your request is denied, you can try requesting the quota increase by creating a support case, or by contacting your account team or TAM.
Create a reservation
Reservations help ensure that you have the Compute Engine resources available to create VMs with the same hardware (memory and vCPUs) and optional resources (GPUs and Local SSD disks) whenever you need them.
An on-demand reservation is provisioned at the time you request it, if the requested capacity is available. A future reservation lets you request capacity in advance and provides you with a high level of assurance in obtaining and securing capacity for peak scale events. We recommend that you procure future reservations well in advance of your event. For more information, see the following:
- Reservations of Compute Engine zonal resources
- Create a reservation for a single project
- Create future reservation requests for a single project