Responsive Software Architecture Patterns for Workload Variations: A Case-study in a CQRS-based Enterprise Application

I. EXTENDED ABSTRACT In any software system, end-users’ workloads vary due to different requirements and business models. In enterprise applications, variation is typically caused by the types of business an organization does, e.g. whether it is a wholesale business with large numbers of orders from the same customer, while supermarkets process single orders for each customer, and each of the orders contains many items. For applications deployed in the cloud, the current approach is to scale the hardware as the usage varies . However, it may be profitable to dynamically adjust the application architecture itself based on the usage of an end-user organization. We term this responsive architecture. Responsive architecture can be dynamically adapted to varying workloads as the components of software maps directly to business elements of the business domain the application is serving. This mapping helps to connect the architecture to the application usage.