Consolidation of Performance and Workload Models in Evolving Cloud Application Topologies

The increase of available Cloud services and providers has contributed to accelerate the development and has broaden the possibilities for building and provisioning Cloud applications in heterogeneous Cloud environments. The necessity for satisfying business and operational requirements in an agile and rapid manner has created the need for adapting traditional methods and tooling support for building and provisioning Cloud applications. Focusing on the application's performance and its evolution, we observe a lack of support for specifying, capturing, analyzing, and reasoning on the impact of using different Cloud services and configurations. This paper bridges such a gap by proposing the conceptual and tooling support to enhance Cloud application topology models to capture and analyze the evolution of the application's performance. The tooling support is built upon an existing modeling environment, which is subsequently evaluated using the MediaWiki (Wikipedia) application and its realistic workload.