Towards studying the performance effects of design patterns for service oriented architecture

Abstract

Patterns employed for the development of a service oriented system may affect its non-functional properties, including performance. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) design patterns provide generic solutions for many architectural, design and implementation problems, and any pattern may have an impact on performance, either positive or negative. This research considers how to characterize the performance impact of a SOA design pattern, which includes characterizing some aspects of the design and usage environment as a whole (for example, the scale of the workload and the availability of concurrent platforms for the eventual deployment). The approach uses performance models to characterize the application and the impact of the pattern on it. The planned approach exploits the context of model driven engineering (MDE) to give rapid feedback to developers about the potential impact of a pattern. Model transformations are used to generate the performance model, and to propagate the effect of applying a SOA design pattern to the performance model. The approach is sketched here with a preliminary case study, demonstrating its feasibility.