PaaSArch Cloud Prototyper Tool

The problem

With an increasing popularity of the PaaS cloud, software architects are dealing with a challenge, how to design applications hosted in the PaaS cloud to fulfill performance related quality requirements, especially throughput, response time and scalability of designed applications. Quality of the designed application and impacts of software architecture related decisions can be evaluated using manually implemented prototypes, which is a time-consuming task.

Our approach

Our performance evaluation approach supported by the PaaSArch Cloud Prototyper Tool allows software architects to evaluate performance related quality metrics in an early design stage of the development by leveraging automatically generated prototypes of the application based on its model. By being able to evaluate different variants of the designed architecture with significantly lower effort than manual implementation of prototypes, software architects have better continuous control over the quality of the application and later costly reimplementations due to missed quality criteria can be effectively prevented.

The tool

The PaaSArch Cloud Prototyper Tool loads an application meta-model created by the software architect (1), validates and analyses the model (2) and based on definition of the application the tool automatically allocates all cloud resources defined in the model (3) and generates code of the prototype (4) which is compiled and deployed to the cloud environment (5). Optionally are sample data generated based on the model (6) and the architect is provided with a list of URL addresses (7) that can be benchmarked using existing benchmarking tools.

The meta-model used for description of designed PaaS cloud applications is designed based on our experience with design and implementation of PaaS cloud applications. It omits implementation details with low impact on the analyzed performance attributes and highlights the aspects with significant impact. The meta-model consists of 3 following components: Collection of applications, Shared definitions of data entities and Allocated cloud resources.

Sample models

As a part of the tool source code we provide following sample models:

Social network sample model in C# format
IoT system sample model in C# format

Publications

D. Gesvindr, B. Buhnova, and O. Gasior, “Quality evaluation of PaaS cloud application design using generated prototypes,” in 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA), April 2017,pp. 31–40.

Download

Source code of the PaaSArch Cloud Prototyper Tool can be downloaded from our GitHub repository.