It's logistics no more and no less. Logistics has been a thing for ever (satisfy a resource requirement). My old man (is not a dustman) but he was Commander Supply for quite a lot of people. At one job, he and his staff would worry about things like Austrian plain chocolate covered mint centred frogs (I'm not joking) to Gurkha rice and not much else (some very concentrated protein etc) water-proofed combat rations. This was in Cyprus in the '80s. Logistics on the green line in Cyprus is probably still as mad now due to the number of countries in the UN.
Anyway, capacity planning is very well understood in general but of course the devil is in the details.
At the moment the IT supply chain is pretty spotty and that affects my little IT firm up to the big boys.
When you buy Cisco + HPE + Dell or whatevs, you go to your reseller (me). I go to my distributor and they suck hardware out of Dell etc and take their cut and I install the gear and take my cut. Sometimes a disty thinks they can do reseller too. The thinking is that they can roll up two lots of margin and shave a bit. That's fine if you can actually do logistics and the "teeth arm" job too.
Clouds think they can go even further and sometimes they can and sometimes not. Now we have a sodding complicated resource on offer with a supply chain that is a bit random.
The whole hyperscale cloud premise is based on infinite availability of raw resources and that is complete bollocks. You can't hyperscale if you can't source stuff indefinitely.
Those Austrian mint filled choccy frogs became a thing for a while. I gave no idea of the exact numbers but presumably Austria supplied quite a lot of them for the UN forces and families in Cyprus in the '80s - they became a bargaining chip for a while. They came in a cardboard package with a lid coloured light blue with outlines of frogs and I think the main box was dark brown or black.
Anyway, capacity planning is very well understood in general but of course the devil is in the details.
At the moment the IT supply chain is pretty spotty and that affects my little IT firm up to the big boys.
When you buy Cisco + HPE + Dell or whatevs, you go to your reseller (me). I go to my distributor and they suck hardware out of Dell etc and take their cut and I install the gear and take my cut. Sometimes a disty thinks they can do reseller too. The thinking is that they can roll up two lots of margin and shave a bit. That's fine if you can actually do logistics and the "teeth arm" job too.
Clouds think they can go even further and sometimes they can and sometimes not. Now we have a sodding complicated resource on offer with a supply chain that is a bit random.
The whole hyperscale cloud premise is based on infinite availability of raw resources and that is complete bollocks. You can't hyperscale if you can't source stuff indefinitely.
Those Austrian mint filled choccy frogs became a thing for a while. I gave no idea of the exact numbers but presumably Austria supplied quite a lot of them for the UN forces and families in Cyprus in the '80s - they became a bargaining chip for a while. They came in a cardboard package with a lid coloured light blue with outlines of frogs and I think the main box was dark brown or black.