Right-sizing infrastructure

Why teams over-provision

Buying too much capacity feels safer than buying too little, especially when a shortfall means an outage and a surplus just means an underused invoice line. Add in long procurement cycles that make it hard to add capacity quickly later, and the incentive tilts hard toward buying more than the current numbers justify.

What a sizing rationale actually does

A documented sizing rationale forces the assumptions behind a purchase into the open — expected load, growth projections, peak-vs-average usage, and the cost of being wrong in either direction. It doesn't eliminate the uncertainty, but it makes the trade-off visible and reviewable instead of buried in a single procurement decision nobody revisits.

Building in a review cadence

Sizing isn't a one-time exercise. Infrastructure purchased for a three-year-old set of assumptions is often carrying capacity nobody needs anymore, or is quietly under-provisioned for growth nobody planned for. A regular review — even an annual one — against actual utilization data catches both directions of drift before they become expensive.