SOA/BPM performance best practices (Addressing complex environments)

Except for maybe simple proof-of-concept proof-of-technology, or demo setups, today's real life business process automation environments are complex.
Complexity often goes along with a variety of different ways to look at it. Some of these views may provide overlapping contents, some others might be disjunct and perhaps also orthogonal to other views.
Having a SOA environment suggests to look at the SOA reference architecture[1], when considering performance related questions in architecture reviews.

Having this architecture chart in mind can help in assessing a solution's performance behaviour or when doing performance problem determination, but usually diagrams on operational topology and application architecture pro­vide much better assistance. Such charts show, how all the involved components are connected and allow to depict, how requests are flowing through the system.

So - whenever you have to troubleshoot performance problems - especially in an unknown environment - make sure you get the charts/pictures that help you understand, how things look like and how they relate to each other. This material also helps a lot in communicating with e.g. system support personnel.

SOA/BPM performance best practices (Intro)

Today's application solutions, that include SOA and Business Process Management are usually spread across a nontrivial operational topology like the one in the picture on the right.

The quality of service that a business process provides to the business is directly dependent on the integrity, availability, and performance characteristics of the involved IT systems. The more components are involved, the more complex the solution will become in every aspect throughout it's life cycle.

The following posts will try to provide an overview (from my limited point of view) on the most important performance aspects to take care of in such a complex environment by

• identifying performance relevant areas,
• providing the most important items to take care of in each of these areas,
• discussing some governance principles to address the integrity issues that might arise in case of performance problems and with planned or unplanned outages.
  

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.