The load on the services tier of enterprise system is typically nonlinear. Matching the infrastructure services to the workload is a key challenge faced by operation teams these days. The complexity starts with understanding the pattern around increase/decrease in the workload, mapping the workload with a scale-out / scale-up plan and then executing the plan manually. The challenges multiply if the workload keeps changing frequently altering the scalability requirements dynamically.

The following diagram illustrates a scenario where the operations team manually manages the scaling of services: