Individual organizations and society as a whole could face major breakdowns if IT systems do not meet their Quality of Service (QoS) requirements on performance, availability, security, and maintainability. Corporations stand to lose valuable income, and public interests could be put at great risk. System designers and analysts usually do not take QoS requirements into account when designing and/or analyzing computer systems, due mainly to their lack of awareness about the issues that affect performance and the lack of a framework to reason about performance. This book describes how to map real-life systems (e.g., databases, data centers, e-commerce applications) into analytic performance models. The authors elaborate upon these models, and use them to help the reader thoroughly analyze and better understand potential performance issues. <br><br>
