Understanding Performance of PayPal as a Service (PPAAS)

May 20 2014
 


In a previous post – Agile Performance Testing – Proactively Managing Performance – I discussed some of the challenges faced in managing a successful performance engineering practices in an Agile development model.  Let’s continue this with a real world example, highlighting how AppDynamics simplifies the collection and comparison of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to give visibility into an Agile development team’s integration with PayPal as a Service (PPaaS).

Our dev team is tasked with building a new shopping cart and checkout capability for an online merchant. They have designed a simple Java Enterprise architecture with a web front-end, built on Apache TomEE, a set of mid-tier services, on JBoss AS 7, and have chosen to integrate with PayPal as the backend payment processor. With PayPal’s Mobile, REST and Classic SDKs, integrating secure payments into their app is a snap and our team knows this is a good choice.

However, the merchant has tight Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and it’s critical the team proactively analyze, and resolve, performance issues in pre-production as part of their Agile process. In order to prepare for meeting these SLAs, they plan to use AppDynamics as part of development and performance testing for end-to-end visibility, and to collect and compare KPIs across sprints.

The dev team is agile and are continuously integrating into their QA test and performance environment. During one of the first sprints they created a basic checkout flow, which is shown below:

Screen Shot 2014-04-29 at 9.28.21 AM

For this sprint they stubbed several of the service calls to PayPal, but coded the first step in authenticating — getting an OAuth Access Token, used to validate payments.

Enabling AppDynamics on their application was trivial, and the dev team got immediate end-to-end visibility into their application flow, performance timings across all tiers, as well as the initial call to PayPal. Based on some initial performance testing everything looks great!

Untitled1

NOTE: in our example AppDynamics is configured to identify backend HTTP Requests (REST Service Invocations) using the first 3 segments of the target URL. This is an easy change and the updated configuration is automatically pushed to the AppDynamics agent without any need to change config files, or restart the application.

Untitled2

In a later sprint, our dev team finished integrating the full payments process flow. They’re using PayPal’s SDK and while it’s a seamless integration, they’re unclear exactly what calls to PayPal are happening under the covers.

Because AppDynamics automatically discovers, maps, and scores all incoming transactions end-to-end, our dev team was able to get immediate and full visibility into two new REST invocations, authorization and payment.

Untitled3

The dynamic discovery of AppDynamics is extremely important in an Agile, continuous integration, or continuous release models where code is constantly changing. Having to manually configure what methods to monitor is a burden that degrades a team’s efficiency.

Needing to understand performance across the two sprints, the team leverages AppDynamics’ Compare Releases functionality to quickly understand the difference between performance runs across the sprints.

Untitled4

AppDynamics flow map visualize the difference in transaction flow between the sprints, highlighting the additional REST calls required to fully process the payment. Also, the KPI comparison gives the dev team an easy way to quickly measure the differences in performance.

Untitled5

Performance has changed, as expected, when implementing the full payment processing flow. During a performance test AppDynamics automatically identifies and takes diagnostics on the abnormal transactions.

Untitled6

Transaction Snapshots capture source line of code call graphs, end-to-end across the Web and Service tiers. Drilling down across the call graphs, the dev team clearly identifies the payment service as the long running call.

Untitled7

AppDynamics provides full context on the REST invocation, and highlights the SDK was configured to talk to PayPal’s sandbox environment, explaining the occasional high-response times.

To recap, our Agile dev team leveraged AppDynamics to get deep end-to-end visibility across their pre-production application environment. AppDynamics release comparison provided the means to understand differences in the checkout flows across sprints, and the dynamic discovery, application mapping, and automatic detection allowed the team to quickly understand and quantify their interactions with PayPal. When transactions deviated away from normal, AppDynamics automatically identified and captured the slowness to provide end-to-end source line of code root-cause analysis.

Take five minutes to get complete visibility into the performance of your production applications with AppDynamics today.

Steve Sturtevant
Steve Sturtevant is a software and performance engineer with close to 15-years of experience in the industry. He has held product manager roles in the APM space, and led performance engineering for PayPal's middleware platforms. Currently Steve works on the Sales Engineering team at AppDynamics.

Thank you! Your submission has been received!

Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form