Portal architecture and performance modeling — cloud and traditional paradigms

What drives the exercise of performance modeling is the combination of system and customer requirements along with the need to predict and control cost, size, and growth of runtime IT environments supporting business goals. The goal of performance modeling can vary, but essentially, one wants to predict which environment configuration would fit a target workload and vice versa. Performance models can be sophisticated and deliver other predictions on metrics from response time to throughput and utilization. Modeling also provides a "what-if" capability to simulate conditional scenarios for peak and mixed workload scenarios and other growth projections that affect IT sizing. There are capacity planning and performance modeling techniques for both traditional and cloud-enabled environments. They both need to be fed by nonfunctional requirements pertaining to performance, scalability, throughput, response time, and...