A Merry Christmas to all!  For the past 10 years I have most of my time traveling the world helping clients to deal with problems that could have been avoided had systems been subjected to effective capacity planning with load testing.  It is entirely possible to deploy any size of web application providing that we have an efficient infrastructure, know the expected amount of traffic and simulate that to 150% of maximum expected traffic levels.  What I am stating is so simple that it sounds too obvious to state and it is really easy to put together also.  Yet in the past 10 years spent with well over 250 clients only 3 of those got anywhere near doing this sort of testing etc.

Instead I find companies will expend either lot's of money on proprietary products or methodologies or lot's of time on open-source products or methodologies that ignore the basics and have no effect on ensuring or improving the performance of the application once deployed.  A classic example of this is the current fad for Agile methodologies, we are avoiding the real needs by employing obfuscation smoke screens.  We create most applications for end-users to use.  They want the application(s) we create to be available and responsive when they need to use them.  In order to ensure that users will find this, we need to effectively employ capacity planning.  

Lastly, the increasing move into more abstraction via Cloud methodologies is a real threat to stability and scalability of all our applications.  At the end of the day we are still running on physicality, on CPU's, in RAM, over networks, those things are still all there we just cannot see them any more and that really bothers me.

12/26/2009 - Update/clarification.  I just want to say that I am not advocating that Cloud computing is not a worthy contender for application deployment, what I am trying to emphasize is that testing prior to deployment is even more important, in Cloud base paradigms.