Performance Challenges, Current Bad Practices, and Hints in PaaS Cloud Application Design

Abstract

Cloud computing is becoming a popular approach to software application operation, utilizing on-demand network access to a pool of shared computing resources, and associated with many benefits including low-effort provisioning, rapid elasticity, maintenance cost reduction and pay-as-yougo billing model. However, application deployment in the cloud is not itself a guarantee of high performance, scalability, and related quality attributes, which may come as a surprise to many software engineers who detract from the importance of proper design of a cloud application, expecting that the cloud itself is the solution. In this paper we analyze the issues and challenges associated with the design of a cloud application that has to be in compliance with given performance criteria, such as the throughput and response time. We also analyze the concerns related to other relevant quality criteria, including scalability, elasticity and availability. To support our findings, we demonstrate the identified performance effects of the examined design decisions on two case studies.