Why Infrastructure Forecasting Fails – Building a Self-Serve Forecasting Platform

Most large organizations still plan infrastructure capacity using spreadsheets, manual reconciliations, and tribal knowledge. It works at small scale. It collapses at hyperscale. As systems grow more interdependent, one team’s workload change silently creates induced demand across shared compute, storage, and platform layers. Forecasts get revised late in the cycle. Finance loses confidence. Engineering overprovisions to stay safe. Toil increases while accuracy decreases. In this talk, I’ll walk through how to replace spreadsheet-driven capacity planning with a self-serve forecasting platform built using control plane design principles. Instead of static files and ad-hoc meetings, forecasting becomes an operational system with explicit dependency modeling, automated recomputation, validation gates, audit trails, and clear ownership boundaries.