Performance modeling evolving Enterprise Service Oriented Architectures

NICTA has developed a service oriented performance modeling technology, and for several years has conducted field-trials of the technology in collaboration with government and non-government projects. The technology enables rapid modeling and performance prediction of large-scale heterogeneous service oriented architectures (SOAs), using a methodology and tool support to model and simulate complex service compositions. Evolution in enterprise service oriented architectures (ESOAs) presents significant challenges to managing risks associated with performance and scalability. Four of the field-trials involved the construction and use of models to specifically address performance risks related to the evolution of service architectures, resulting from, and to explore changes in: architecture, services, deployment, resources, and loads. This paper first presents some unifying observations on the architectural commonalities of evolving enterprise services, discusses the performance and scalability challenges, and describes some common approaches to addressing them. We then demonstrate service oriented performance modeling applied to an illustrative example of enterprise service evolution. We conclude with a presentation of four case-studies which summarize our experiences with performance modeling evolving service architectures.