oldCapacity

oldCapacity is a conventional label used to denote the previous capacity level of a resource before a change such as scaling, upgrade, or reconfiguration. It is typically a numeric value representing units of capacity—such as the number of running instances, maximum concurrent requests, or allocated storage—that is stored alongside a corresponding newCapacity value.

In software and cloud contexts, oldCapacity often appears in automation scripts, deployment pipelines, and capacity-planning documents. It enables comparison between the prior and current states, helps calculate deltas, and supports decisions about scaling actions, rollbacks, or resource reallocation. The concept is commonly paired with newCapacity to track changes over time and to audit how capacity evolved during a given operation.

Examples of usage include autoscaling policies that record the previous replica count as oldCapacity before increasing or decreasing the number of instances, or configuration management tasks that log the prior storage quota as oldCapacity prior to resizing volumes. In database or data-processing pipelines, oldCapacity might reflect prior throughput limits or shard allocations to guide reconfiguration.

Best practices for using oldCapacity include validating that the value reflects the actual previous state, avoiding race conditions by timestamping updates, and logging both oldCapacity and newCapacity for traceability. It is often a transient, implementation-specific variable rather than a standardized concept.

See also: capacity planning, autoscaling, capacity unit, delta.