A Case Study of Transactional Workload Running in Virtual Machines: The Performance Evaluation of a Flight Seats Availability Service

Much of the research has focused on performance evaluation and, particularly, the response time of clusters in cloud computing. However, one important topic has hardly been addressed: the impact of virtual machine consolidation on real business cases, on companies driven by requirements for high performance in transaction response time, specifically on intermediation trip companies. The ability to provide quality service, guaranteed within several milliseconds, is crucial to the business success of these cluster platforms. We present a case study for evaluating the performance of the seat availability service used by a flight carrier. The case study is the application of the performance evaluation methodology that ranges from monitoring to tuning options of a real-world service running on virtual machines, to understand capacity planning or possible substitution by other configurations of virtualization or containerization of the architecture of the cloud platform. This case study also proposes a workload characterisation using data clusters, allowing the architecture to be modeled as a simple network of multiclass queues of any virtual machine on the platform. Additionally, we estimate the new transaction response time by the possibility of either reducing or incrementing the number of virtual machines and their replacement by containers