Service-Oriented Performance Modeling the MULE Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Loan Broker Application

Since 2006 NICTA has been developing and trialing service-oriented performance modeling (SOPM), a method and tool support for performance modeling of large-scale heterogeneous service oriented architectures (SOAs). This technology enables software architects to rapidly build performance models of SOAs directly in terms of service compositions. Enterprise service buses (ESBs) are an increasingly common style of SOA infrastructure and implementation technology that we have encountered and modeled in e-government SOA projects. In this paper we show the application of our SOPM approach to the MULE enterprise service bus loan broker application in a laboratory context. We give a high-level outline of the SOPM method, and introduce the MULE ESB and loan broker application. We describe how a SOPM of the loan broker application is built in terms of application business-logic services and MULE infrastructure service components, and parameterized with measurements from an experimental test-bed. We demonstrate the validity of the approach in an initial scenario, and then explore the modeling of alternative deployment and application scenarios.