SOA/BPM performance best practices (Abstract)

In the following few posts, I'd like to provide a wide, high-level overview on lessons learned, best practices, and performance engineering for business process management (BPM) and choreography in the context of SOA. The considerations concentrate on WebSphere Process Server (WPS) and it's BPM component Business Process Choreographer (BPC). However, most of the principles should apply to other BPM automation products as well.

BPM/BPC is one of the core services of IBM's SOA stack and is actually older than SOA itself. The areas of best practices encompass more than just the classical IT disciplines.

It starts with business process analysis and business process modeling. Analyzing and modeling the ways an enterprise works (or should work) in too much details can lead to processing low level logic within the context of a business process model running in the business process engine. As a consequence more cycles will be used and business process versioning could become more difficult to manage.

Careful planning and designing the end user interactions with new business process applications can avoid that selecting and getting a unit of work takes more cycles than getting the work done.

Defining the operational topology to meet scalability and availability requirements can have similar performance implications as the large set of configuration parameters in a single WAS/WPS node.

Since the above product stack runs on classical operating systems and their infrastructure all typical performance considerations need to be applied there as well. The scope spans from influencing dispatching priorities and memory related tuning knobs in the participating subsystems to I/O subsystem configurations used for persisting business process related state and data.

As SOA with BPM/BPC integrates and aggregates business services to new complexities, so does its use impose challenges in managing product and services dependencies in the transition from development of the business process applications into day to day operation with the classical IT management disciplines including (but not limited to) monitoring and problem and change management.

Performance Engineering can be extended to include business services and business processes within the scope of the various performance engineering disciplines.