FastSOA Performance and Scalability Test Kit Solution

A comprehensive solution to quantify your SOA and XML-centric application scalability and performance

SOA Architecture and Performance Challenges
Today, software architects and developers make many technology choices to build software using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) patterns. For instance, developers choose from XML parsing techniques, service libraries, encoding techniques, protocols, hardware and overall technology architecture including services, data, security and networking. Each choice creates an impact on the scalability and performance of the finished service.

Maintaining good scalability and performance becomes a major effort as an enterprise builds more services and the user base broadens. After large enterprises introduce initial services for SOA, managing service growth and system scalability and performance becomes mission critical.
Most enterprises have a tiered architecture for SOA. The Presentation Tier provides browser-based (HTML, AJAX or RSS) user interfaces or a service interface for a business process using a SOAP, REST or Java calls. The Middle Tier implements business processes using application server, Business Process Workflow (BPEL or JBI) and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technologies. The Enterprise Tier provides access to data, services and security data. For instance, Figure 1 illustrates a user requesting a function. The Presentation Tier calls a Middle Tier Servlet that accesses the business logic in an Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) or Plain Old Java Object (POJO). The Middle Tier accesses a combination of service-enabled enterprise applications over an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and data from a database using object-relational mapping technology and security credentials from an LDAP-based security service.

Figure 1 - Enterprise SOA Architecture

Information systems using SOA encounter performance and scalability issues in the following ways:
	The service interface between the Presentation Tier and Middle Tier needs to support complex and large messages. The service binding proxy interfaces that are automatically created by application servers and other tools are usually inefficient and can create scalability bottlenecks.
	The choice of XML parsing library makes a huge impact on the Middle Tier's ability to perform quickly and provide scalability.
	In the middle-tier, an XML-based SOA application often encounters performance bottlenecks from passing XML data from object to object.
	The service interface between the Presentation Tier and Middle Tier needs to support complex and large messages. The service binding proxy interfaces that are automatically created by application servers and other tools are usually inefficient and can create scalability bottlenecks.
	Transformation from one schema to another in the Middle Tier often presents the biggest performance and scalability challenge for the entire system.
	A developer choice to shred XML messages in the Middle Tier and use an Object/Relational mapping technology (such as Hibernate) usually introduces performance bottlenecks that do not exist in XML-centric approaches.
	Developer productivity often decreases and the number of lines of code increases when a developer chooses the wrong library, utility and approach.

FastSOA Performance and Scalability Test Kit Solution
The FastSOA Performance and Scalability Test Kit provides the information every enterprise software architect, engineer and IT manager needs to understand the scalability and performance of their Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The FastSOA Kit provides a turnkey solution to evaluate SOA technology in your own environment. The FastSOA Kit includes a complete test methodology, scales to meet your specific business requirements and identifies the necessary computer hardware and network requirements. The FastSOA Kit is based on over five years of performance, scalability and Quality Assurance (QA) testing and currently used by many customers including BEA, Sun Microsystems and General Motors.

The FastSOA Performance and Scalability Test Kit:
	Tests and delivers SOA performance data and teaches your developers the best practices to deliver well performing SOA leveraging XML technologies
	Includes SOA scalability test methodology, PushToTest TestMaker platform test environment, use cases and results analysis
	Ready for you to press the "Start" button and see the results in your environment
	Implements three use cases common to the majority of applications. Automates operating the use cases as load tests to determine a Scalability Index
	Presents results in a live set of charts to understand the metrics
	Compares SOA built with popular tools (BEA WLS, JBoss, WebSphere, Oracle) and FastSOA powered by the TigerLogic XML Data Management Server (XDMS)
	Provides fully implemented use cases for XML scenarios, payload sizes, concurrent requests and data transformations
	Has full source code and software development kit to implement custom business logic specific to your enterprise
	Includes a Developer Journal (80 pages) explaining step-by-step instructions on building the use case on today's commercial and open-source tools
	A 100% Java application that runs on any modern server hardware

The FastSOA Performance and Scalability Test Kit Solution is available from Raining Data as a licensed product and service. A comprehensive enterprise SOA performance and scalability test, plus associated optimizations, typically takes from four to eight weeks. See Figure 2 for a sample work plan.

Figure 2 - Sample FastSOA Performance Test Work Plan for a Large Enterprise

The test results allow companies to understand and quantify any performance and scalability issues. Raining Data also provides potential solutions to SOA performance bottlenecks such as FastSOA Mid-Tier Data Cache and TigerLogic XDMS.

Product Brochure
Fast SOA Performance Kit Product Overview (207 KB pdf)

For inquiries, please contact SOA product sales at 949-442-4400 or email soatestkit@rainingdata.com.