Automating the performance management of component-based enterprise systems through the use of redundancy

Component technologies are increasingly being used for building enterprise systems, as they can address complex functionality and flexibility problems and reduce development and maintenance costs. Nonetheless, current component technologies provide little support for predicting and controlling the emerging performance of software systems that are assembled from distinct components. This paper presents a framework for automating the performance management of complex, component-based systems. The adopted approach is based on the alternate usage of multiple component variants with equivalent functional characteristics, each one optimized for a different running environment. A fully-automated framework prototype for J2EE is presented, along with results from managing a sample enterprise application on JBoss. A mechanism that uses monitoring data to learn and automatically improve the framework’s management behaviour is proposed. The framework imposes no extra requirements on component providers, or on the component technologies. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.9 [Software Engineering]: Management—Software configuration management, Software quality assurance (SQA); D.2.8 [Software Engineering]: Metrics—Performance measure