Theme section on performance modelling and engineering of software and systems

Excerpt

The modelling of the performance of today’s computer systems is getting more and more challenging. While most models traditionally focused on utilization and response time of a single system, technologies such as cloud and containerization require new approaches to efficiently handle the complexity of current installations. The meaning of the word performance is constantly changing—currently covers additional non-functional aspects including security and reliability. In a world full of software systems composed of huge number of microservices running on cloud infrastructures, a single service is less important than in the traditional system architectures. In contrast to the classical systems, the entire network of containerized services needs to be efficiently operated, monitored and orchestrated. Containers are automatically deployed, scaled and operated by orchestration middleware, IaaS is re-arranging their resources dynamically, and several independent services might compete for the same resources. To optimize efficiency users, developers and operators need new approaches to model systems and their behaviour, allowing not only to evaluate the systems retrospectively, but also to take the right actions proactively in near real time. …