Intern
Chair of Computer Science II - Software Engineering

Technical Report on Performance-oriented DevOps Published

10.07.2015

The Chair of Software Engineering made major contributions to a Technical Report on a research agenda for performance-oriented DevOps published by the SPEC as part of its ongoing collaboration with the SPEC RG DevOps Performance Working Group.

DevOps is a trend towards a tighter integration between development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams. The need for such an integration is driven by the requirement to continuously adapt enterprise applications (EAs) to changes in the business environment. As of today, DevOps concepts have been primarily introduced to ensure a constant flow of features and bug fi xes into new releases from a functional perspective. In order to integrate a non-functional perspective into these DevOps concepts, this report focuses on tools, activities, and processes to ensure one of the most important quality attributes of a software system, namely performance.

Performance describes system properties concerning its timeliness and use of resources. Common metrics are response time, throughput, and resource utilization. Performance goals for EAs are typically de fined by setting upper and/or lower bounds for these metrics and specifi c business transactions. In order to ensure that such performance goals can be met, several activities are required during development and operation of these systems as well as during the transition from Dev to Ops. Activities during development are typically summarized by the term Software Performance Engineering (SPE), whereas activities during operations are called Application Performance Management (APM). SPE and APM were historically tackled independently from each other, but the newly emerging DevOps concepts require and enable a tighter integration between both activity streams. This report presents existing solutions to support this integration as well as open research challenges in this area.

The report starts by defi ning EAs and summarizes their characteristics that make performance evaluations for these systems particularly challenging. It continues by describing our understanding of DevOps and explaining the roots of this trend to set the context for the remaining parts of the report. Afterwards, performance management activities that are common in both life cycle phases are explained, until the particularities of SPE and APM are discussed in separate sections. Finally, the report concludes by outlining activities and challenges to support
the rapid iteration between Dev and Ops.

Andreas Brunnert, Andre van Hoorn, Felix Willnecker, Alexandru Danciu, Wilhelm Hasselbring, Christoph Heger, Nikolas Herbst, Pooyan Jamshidi, Reiner Jung, Joakim von Kistowski, Anne Koziolek, Johannes Kroß, Simon Spinner, Christian Vögele, Jürgen Walter, and Alexander Wert. Performance-oriented DevOps: A research agenda. Technical Report SPEC-RG-2015-01, SPEC Research Group - DevOps Performance Working Group, Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), 2015.

The report can be found here.

 

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