Building a TaaS platform for web service load testing

Web services are widely known as the building blocks of typical service oriented applications. The performance of such an application system is mainly dependent on that of component web services. Thus the effective load testing of web services is of great importance to understand and improve the performance of a service oriented system. However, existing Web Service load testing tools ignore the real characteristics of the practical running environment of a web service, which leads to inaccurate test results. In this work, we present WS-TaaS, a load testing platform for web services, which enables load testing process to be as close as possible to the real running scenarios. In this way, we aim at providing testers with more accurate performance testing results than existing tools. WS-TaaS is developed on the basis of our existing Cloud PaaS platform: Service4All. First, we provide detailed analysis of the requirements of Web Service load testing and present the conceptual architecture and design of key components. Then we present the implementation details of WS-TaaS on the basis of Service4All. Finally, we perform a set of experiments based on the testing of real web services, and the experiments illustrate that WS-TaaS can efficiently facilitate the whole process of Web Service load testing.