A.8.6 Capacity Management
Control Objective
The use of resources shall be monitored and adjusted in line with current and expected capacity requirements.
Policy Statement
anDREa systematically monitors, evaluates, and manages both technical infrastructure and human capital requirements. This ensures the continuous availability, scalability, and performance of the myDRE platform under varying workloads, while preventing operational bottlenecks in development, support, or compute allocation.
1. Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Capacity (Microsoft Azure)
Because myDRE executes workloads within client-owned public cloud environments, infrastructure capacity management is governed through a collaborative model between the client, local Research Support Teams (RST), and the anDREa Support Team.
Compute Quotas and Scaling
- Subscription Ownership: To deploy myDRE, a customer organization must provision at least two Microsoft Azure subscriptions linked to their own enterprise billing account.
- Quota Management: High-performance resources—such as large Virtual Machines (VMs) or specialized GPU instances—are subject to native cloud quota boundaries.
- Elevation Workflows: Project members must request quota increases via their local RST. The RST validates the technical request and scales it natively if they possess Subscription Owner privileges. If restricted by vendor-side baseline limits, the request is escalated to the anDREa Support Team to negotiate a capacity expansion directly with Microsoft.
Workspace Limits and Architecture
- Tenant Deployment Scalability: One Azure subscription is explicitly configured for end-user Workspace deployment. To prevent API throttling and resource exhaustion, each individual subscription is architecturally capped at a maximum of 100 active Workspaces.
- Proactive Onboarding: Customers and RSTs are strongly advised to prepare and communicate the need for a secondary deployment subscription well in advance of reaching the 100-workspace threshold. This prevents provisioning delays for new research projects.
- Telemetry and Monitoring: The myDRE Admin Portal provides real-time telemetry, displaying an accurate count of available workspace slots remaining within an active subscription to aid RST planning.
- Shared Infrastructure: The second mandatory Azure subscription is dedicated exclusively to hosting structural shared resources across the tenant ecosystem (e.g., Azure Bastion, application/software deployment shares, and workspace archive storage pools).
2. Human Resource & Operational Capacity
To maintain standard service level agreements (SLAs) and keep pace with product roadmap milestones, human operational capacity is structured as follows:
- Sprint Planning & Allocation: Technical engineering, maintenance, and support desk capacities are granularly estimated, distributed, and tracked within Azure DevOps during bi-weekly sprint planning sessions.
- Strategic Planning: Broad organizational headcount, support queue metrics, and development velocities are reviewed during the annual budgeting and forecasting process conducted by the Management Team to ensure staffing keeps pace with platform adoption.
3. Cross-References
- Architectural Baselines: For full deep-dives into multi-subscription topology, peering arrangements, and shared network assets, refer to the myDRE Highlevel Architecture and Onboarding Subscriptions.