Analyzing a Modeled System

Architectural analysis describes the activity of discovering important system properties—like functional requirements and service-level objectives (SLOs)—using models of the system. The main benefit of such analysis is that software architects can assess their design and what-if scenarios without having to implement each option. For example, architects can easily elaborate alternatives and variants of HowTos. This chapter describes how software architects follow the CloudScale method to model and analyze systems via ScaleDL. The chapter links the CloudScale Method outlined in Chap. 5 with the ScaleDL language described in Chap. 4 For ScaleDL modeling, the most important manual and automated steps are described. For ScaleDL analysis, the usage of the Analyzer tool is detailed. A running example brings the different pieces together and shows how scalability, elasticity, and cost-efficiency can be projected based on a ScaleDL model.

The chapter starts in Sect. 6.1 with detailing the modeling steps in the CloudScale method. We refine the two steps specific for the model-based analysis of a modeled system: the specification of ScaleDL models (Sect. 6.2) and using CloudScale’s Analyzer tool for its analysis (Sect. 6.3). After a detailed description of these steps, we illustrated the whole process based on our running example (Sect. 6.4).