Service-oriented systems are often at the core of mission- or business-critical systems, and thus advanced quantitative analysis techniques are needed to assess, from the early development stages, whether or not the system accomplishes the stakeholder requirements and constraints. In this respect, in order to take advantage of the distributed nature of the considered systems, the use of distributed simulation (DS) appears the most natural and effective simulation approach. Nevertheless, the integration of traditional system development processes with DS approaches can be cost-And time-demanding. This paper presents SOAsim, a highly automated framework that allows system designers to generate the executable DS code from the model-based specification of the system under study, by use of automated model transformations. Moreover, in order to reduce the costs of setting-up dedicated DS platforms, SOAsim also automates the DS deployment and execution over a cloud-based infrastructure, according to a Platform-As-A-Service (PaaS) paradigm. © 2016 IEEE.