APE: An Automated Performance Engineering Process for Software as a Service Environments

The Software as a Service (SaaS) paradigm is changing the way in which businesses procure software solutions. A service provider hosts the software solution amortizing management and infrastructure costs across the businesses it serves. For complex software offerings, each business may use a given software platform in very different ways. This need for customization can pose performance challenges and risks for those hosting the software as a service. This paper presents an Automated Performance Engineering (APE) process for transaction oriented enterprise applications that supports infrastructure selection, sizing, and performance validation for customized service instances in hosted software environments.