Bottlenecks and link upgrades

Sat Aug 15 09:34:10 UTC 2020

On Sat, Aug 15, 2020, at 02:39, Louie Lee wrote:

> get an understanding of your traffic growth and try to project when you 
> will reach that number. You have to decide whether you care about the 
> occasional peak, or the consistent peak, or somewhere in between, like 
> weekday vs weekends, etc. Now you know how much lead time you will have.

Get an understanding, and try to make a plan on the longer term (like 2-3 years) if you can. If you're reaching some important milestones (e.g need to buy expensive hardware), make a presentation for the management.
You will definitely need adjustments, during the timespan covered (some things will need to be done sooner, others may leave you some extra time) but it should reduce the amount of surprise.

That is valid if you have visibility. If you don't (that may happen), the cheatsheet I described previously is a good start. It could be applied at $job[-1], where I applied it to grow the network from almost zero to 35 Gbps, and it is kind of applied at $job[$now] where long term visibility is kind of missing and we need to be ready for rapid capacity variations.

> And sometimes, if you need a low latency connection, traffic 
> utilization levels might not even be something you look at.

This goes to the "understand your traffic" chapter. All the traffic (sine sometimes there may be a mix, e.g. regular eyeball traffic + voice traffic).