underprovision

Underprovision is the practice of allocating fewer resources than needed to support expected workloads, applications, or services. When capacity is insufficient, performance degrades, requests fail, and service outages may occur, especially during peak periods. The term is commonly used in information technology and operations, but can apply to staffing, inventory, and other resource domains.

Causes include inaccurate demand forecasting, sudden workload spikes, budget or policy constraints, misconfigured auto-scaling, aging infrastructure, and growth outpacing capacity planning. It can be intentional (cost-saving) or unintentional (planning error).

Effects can include higher latency, timeouts, error rates, service degradation, throttling, and potential business impact. In critical systems, underprovisioning can threaten availability and compliance, and may trigger outages that cascade to dependent services.

Examples vary by domain. In cloud computing, reserving too little CPU, memory, or storage can leave applications short of capacity. Insufficient network bandwidth may lead to congestion. Database connection pools that are too small or storage I/O bottlenecks can also reflect underprovisioning. In manufacturing or logistics, staffing or material shortages can create similar gaps in performance.

Detection and mitigation involve monitoring utilization and latency with alerting, and adopting capacity planning and load testing. Implement elastic or auto-scaling policies with safe minimums and cooldowns, and reserve headroom for peak loads. Use redundancy and failover, conduct regular reviews of demand trends, and consider staged scaling or buffer capacity and budget safeguards.

Relation to provisioning: underprovisioning means underestimating needs and selecting minimal resources, while overprovisioning wastes cost. Optimal provisioning aims for a balance that meets service level objectives while managing risk.