You have migrated an e-commerce application to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). You want to prepare the application for the upcoming busy season. What should you do first to prepare for the busy season?

Load testing the application is the foundational first step because it provides crucial data on how the application performs under anticipated high traffic, identifies bottlenecks, and validates the effectiveness of its scaling mechanisms. This profiling is essential before making any scaling decisions or configurations.

While enabling AutoScaling is important, doing it without prior load testing means you lack data on appropriate scaling triggers and capacities, which could lead to under- or over-provisioning or unexpected performance issues.

Pre-provisioning double the compute power is a reactive and potentially wasteful approach without empirical data from load testing to justify the specific increase needed.

A runbook for DR environment inflation is a good preparedness step but is secondary to ensuring the primary application can handle the load, and doesn't directly address the performance and scaling of the production environment for peak season.