Comment by nickdothutton
4 hours ago
Back in the late 90s a senior Microsoft exec explained this to me, they had acquired staff and continued to operate entire divisions which he described as "ballast". In the future, once the stock price increases slowed, they would be heaved over the edge of the balloon basket so that it could continue to rise. I often think about that.
old sysadmin trick: create large file on a disk and in a dire situation when DB runs out of space delete it.
The classic Speed Up Loop
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Speedup-Loop
Genuine kubernetes scaling strategy: add a do-nothing container that runs with a lower priority than your real workloads, that requests half a machine’s worth of mcpu.
When you deploy a new container, and all your nodes are fully allocated, that low priority container will get evicted, and your container will immediately get scheduled in its place. Then k8s will try to find somewhere to put that half-machine container. If it finds somewhere it fits, it’ll schedule it. If not, it’ll trigger your cluster auto scale to add a new node where that task can run, making sure the next container you want to deploy has some readily available capacity to drop on to.
Basically the same sysadmin strategy, automated.
Or on Amazon elastic filesystems... create giant files just to ensure you're in the right performance class for the files you do need (that was the official way of doing it for a while!).
old defence against unreasonably demanding manager: add deliberate pockets of slow processing as insurance so that when things get too hot about performance, you unclog a few of those to acquiesce management.