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ePASA
Performance Engineering of Large Complex Systems
At a Glance
NICTA’s Performance Assessment for Service Architectures (ePASA) team has created technologies that allow organisations to confidently build, manage and alter the large complex ICT systems that support the delivery of vital services to customers. ePASA helps users uncover the performance details of large systems and to spot the problem areas that could cause them to fail. Possible changes to an IT system are simulated rapidly so that system alterations and upgrades can be implemented safely, providing more reliable delivery of services and avoidance of catastrophic meltdowns. ePASA is now a commercial-ready technology developed through a program of empirical research with partners in government and industry.
The NICTA Approach
- NICTA technologies are based on scientific rigour and developed in collaboration with public and private sector trial partners to provide ‘real-world’ technology validation.
- NICTA ePASA has been refined and tested through extensive field trials that have repeatedly demonstrated measurable business value to collaborating partners.
The Features of ePASA
- Performance engineering approach, using unique modelling and simulation technologies, that allows organisations to flush out the performance characteristics of their complex IT environment
- Suite of development methods and software tools based on the concepts and language of Service Oriented Performance Modelling (PDF)
- Ideally suited for use in heterogeneous ICT environments to model end-to-end systems, regardless of specific vendor components
- Permits ‘What if’ simulations allow the architect to explore alternative system designs and therefore avert performance problems before system implementation
The Benefits of ePASA
- Determines whether new customer-facing systems will “meltdown” under heavy load before they are deployed in production
- Models the end-to- end components of internal and customer-facing services to identify critical performance dependencies across sub-systems
- Provides a cost effective approach for managing performance-related risks associated with system scalability and availability
- Detects serious architectural flaws, and identifies corrective action, to avoid significant project delays and massive re-work costs
- Delivers Performance Engineering services throughout the project lifecycle (PDF), and improves ICT governance across the organisation
The Future
- NICTA ePASA is available now for proof-of-concept and production-scale deployments in financial services, utilities and telcos, retail and logistics, public sector agencies and defence
- We continue to seek delivery partners to acquire ePASA implementation capability
- We are seeking strategic innovation partnerships with customer organisations that want to help shape the future technology directions of the solution
Research
More information about the research area, research contributions and future challenges for this technology.
Additional Material
Technical Papers
- Brebner, P., O'Brien, L., Gray, J. Performance Modelling for Service Oriented Architectures, Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2008), Companion Volume. ACM, 2008, pp. 953-954.
Exhibitions/Demonstrations
- ICSE 2008 (Leipzig, Germany), ePASA Exhibition Poster (PDF).
Recent Conference and Seminar Presentations
- ACS Annual Conference, Canberra, March 2009 (PDF presentation)
- Virtualisation in an SOA environment(PDF), Canberra, February 2009
- GovTech EMEA, Dubai, November 2008 (PDF presentation)
Training Courses
- 2-Day Course Managing Performance Risks in SOA (PDF) – see NICTA Industry Courses website for latest delivery.