Resource Provisioning in an E-commerce Application

It is the responsibility of an e-commerce provider to provision resources to ensure that the performance of the services provided by an e-commerce application is acceptable. A quantitative estimate of the performance expected from the site, obtained from the expected workload imposed on the application, may allow the provider to make informed decisions with respect to the right level of resources so that acceptable service performance may be offered in a cost-effective manner. In this paper we first present a systematic methodology to estimate the performance expected from an e-commerce application based on the representation of the e-commerce workload. Subsequently, we discuss how the estimate of the expected application performance could guide resource provisioning decisions. We illustrate the performance estimation and resource provisioning methodology using the TPC-W benchmark.