Case Study: RECAP Capacity Planning for a Cloud-based Big Data Talent Matching Service

Small businesses typically operate in constrained business environments with a tension between scaling for growth and cashflow. While cloud computing provides significant benefits in terms of cashflow management and scalability, controlling consumption and managing complex cloud infrastructure with a small IT team can be a significant challenge. Small businesses may not be able to accommodate reactive approaches to infrastructure provisioning (given the elevated warm-up times) and testing new configurations on live environments can be costly, time consuming, and involve operational risk. Simulation allows effective and efficient evaluation and experimentation of cloud infrastructure configurations and provisioning/de-provisioning of capacity by examining how infrastructure reacts to demand in the short and medium term.