In this paper we propose a methodology to retrofit admission control in an Internet-scale, production application. Admission control requires less effort to improve the availability of an application, in particular when making it scalable is costly. This can occur due to the integration of 3rd-party legacy code or handling large amounts of data, and is further motivated by lean thinking, which argues for building a minimum viable product to discover customer requirements.

Our main contribution consists in a method to generate an amplified workload, that is realistic enough to test all kinds of what-if scenarios, but does not require an exhaustive transition matrix. This workload generator can then be used to iteratively stress-test the application, identify the next bottleneck and add admission control.

To illustrate the usefulness of the approach, we report on our experience with adding admission control within SimScale, a Software-as-a-Service start-up for engineering simulations, that already features 50,000 users.