Automated Performance Assessment for Service-Oriented Middleware

Middleware for Web service compositions, such as BPEL engines, provides the execution environment for services as well as additional functionalities, such as monitoring and self-tuning. Given its role in service provisioning, it is very important to assess the performance of middleware in the context of a Serviceoriented Architecture (SOA). This paper presents SOABench, a framework for the automatic generation and execution of testbeds for benchmarking middleware for composite Web services and for assessing the performance of existing SOA infrastructures. SOABench defines a testbed model characterized by the composite services to execute, the workload to generate, the deployment configuration to use, the performance metrics to gather, the data analyses to perform on them, and the reports to produce. We have validated SOABench by benchmarking the performance of different BPEL engines.