Capacity Planning

(Seems reasonable to have the Statistics for Engineers course be a pre-req for this course)

Fundamentals of capacity planning

Resource usage investigation and exploration

Examples: CPU:req/sec ratio, memory footprint:req/sec ratio, disk consumption per user/per sale/per widget, etc.
Application:Infrastructure metric relationships
2nd order capacity (logging, metrics+monitoring systems, ancillary systems)

Finding ceilings

Discovering resource limits
Comparing different hardware/instance profiles - production load versus synthetic

Benchmarking: pitfalls, limitations, pros/cons

http://www.contextneeded.com/system-benchmarks

Multivariate infra limits (multiple resource peak-driven usage) Ex: web+image uploads, caching storage+processing, etc.
Architecture analysis (anticipating the next bottleneck)

Forecasting

Details of automatic forecasting and scaling

Seasonality and future events

Organic growth approaches (bottom-up infra driven, top-down app driven)
inorganic growth events (new feature launch, holiday effects, "going viral", major public announcement)
Provisioning effects on timelines, financial tradeoffs

Diagonal scaling

(vertically scaling your already horizontal architecture)

Reprovisioning and legacy system usage tradeoffs