Cloud platforms have long promised near-limitless scale, but a growing number of organisations are hitting a wall they never planned for: capacity itself. Failed deployments, quota restrictions, unavailable SKUs and regional shortages are becoming increasingly common, particularly as AI workloads place unprecedented demand on cloud infrastructure.

Drawing on real-world customer experiences, this session explores what's driving Azure capacity constraints, why some regions and VM families are under more pressure than others, and how these limitations are reshaping decisions around resiliency, disaster recovery and regional architecture. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for assessing capacity risk in their own environments, along with mitigation strategies including reserved capacity, flexible SKU selection, regional diversification and capacity-aware landing zone design. As capacity becomes an increasingly scarce resource, architects must learn to treat it as a first-class design consideration alongside security, cost and availability.