How to Estimate vCPU Core, Memory & Disk Size for a Cloud Server?

Steps to estimate the system requirements like vCPU, RAM/Memory, Storage Disk size, HDD/SSD during a cloud server setup for an application.

User statistic dashboard. Source: Luke Chesser from Unsplash

I searched many places but didn’t find any complete guide on how we do a rough estimation of cloud server hardware requirements needed to cater to an application, like a web app, a mobile app, or a background service.

Whether it is a cloud or an on-prem server we need to set up, system requirement is one of the most ambiguous requirements we need to gather.

Estimating system requirement it’s like an art job.

It is up to individual creativity to get an estimation as close as the actual case. I believe there are thousands of ways to do system requirement estimation out there.

Possible estimation data types:

• Historical analytics from Google Analytics (If there are one)
• Stress test result
• Load test result
• Number of users expected
• Nature of the application
• And many other assumptions