Capacity Planning -- have I dated myself?

A couple days ago, one of the project managers used the word "rewind", I told her that she just dated herself. For those of you who doesn't know what "rewind" means, google it! It's a verb referring rolling back of a sequential storage media, e.g.: rewind a video tape. Who uses a tape now?

Another day, I asked my team to "plan the production web servers' capacity" accordingly. As I come to think about it, I just dated myself as well!!!! With the maturing IaaS (infrastructure as a service) based hosting, known as the Cloud, capacity planning is overrated.

With the elastic capacity model, there isn't a need for any sophisticated planning. New web servers can be spawned as quick as a few minutes. With a decent traffic trend monitoring setup, server capacity can be scaled upward with a push of a button. If you really want to sleep tight and get fancy, you can setup automatic scaling, such as, http://aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/.

Why bother planning, set the capacity to the auto-pilot mode!