Your network should not have to fail before you know it needs more capacity.
Modern infrastructure rarely becomes constrained in a clean, predictable way. A WAN link may look healthy on average while busy-hour traffic approaches saturation. A redundant design may have plenty of capacity until one component fails. A cloud migration can move the bottleneck rather than eliminate it. Wi-Fi may offer impressive PHY rates while airtime becomes the real constraint.
Capacity Planning for Growing Networks gives network engineers, architects, infrastructure professionals, and technical leaders a practical framework for identifying these problems before performance deteriorates.
Rather than treating capacity as a simple bandwidth number, Rion Frost shows how to connect demand, architecture, service objectives, resilience, uncertainty, cost, and delivery time. The book develops capacity planning as a continuous engineering discipline built around trustworthy evidence and timely decisions.
Inside, you will learn how to:
- interpret utilization, peaks, percentiles, busy-hour behavior, latency, loss, and queueing;
- combine counters, flow records, active measurements, topology, and streaming telemetry;
- forecast future demand using growth models, scenarios, known projects, and uncertainty;
- calculate headroom under normal, maintenance, and failure conditions;
- analyze oversubscription, ECMP behavior, shared infrastructure, and traffic matrices;
- plan capacity for campus, data center, WAN, internet edge, SD-WAN, cloud, Wi-Fi 6E/7, and Kubernetes environments;
- connect infrastructure forecasts to procurement lead times, budgets, decision gates, and upgrade roadmaps;
- automate repetitive capacity analysis without replacing engineering judgment.
The book moves beyond monitoring to show how to build a defensible capacity story: what is happening now, what is driving it, what is likely to happen next, which resource will constrain first, when a decision must be made, and which response best balances performance, resilience, cost, and flexibility.
Practical case studies, expert perspectives, formulas, troubleshooting workflows, planning scenarios, anti-patterns, review templates, and a field toolkit turn the principles into a repeatable operating model for real infrastructure teams.
If you want to stop reacting to congestion and start planning infrastructure before the risk becomes an incident, this book provides the framework.