Title: CWOM: a lightweight cloud-oriented workflow optimisation middleware

Authors: Peng Xiao

Addresses: School of Computer and Communication, Hunan Institute of Engineering, Xiangtan City, Hunan Province 411104, China

Abstract: In recent years, more and more workflow applications have been developed to execute on various kinds of cloud platforms. Although many cloud-based workflow management and enactment systems have been proposed, there are still many challenges when deploying and executing workflows on various kinds of real-world cloud platform. In this paper, we present a lightweight framework, namely cloud-oriented workflow optimisation middleware (CWOM), which is designed for easing the work of optimising the workflow execution efficiency as well as the work of realising fine-grained workflow management. The proposed CWOM is implemented as a plug-in middleware that can interact with the other workflow services and therefore provide more desirable services for workflow applications. Another advantage of our CWOM is that its services are loosely coupled with other cloud services, which makes it more flexible and configurable in most of the real-world cloud platforms. To investigate the effectiveness of the proposed system, we deploy the prototype implementation of CWOM in a campus-based cloud platform, and the experimental results indicate that it can significantly improve the delivered QoS and enhance the service level offered by conventional workflow solutions.

Keywords: cloud computing; workflow; virtual machine; performance monitor.

DOI: 10.1504/IJNVO.2021.111617

International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations, 2021 Vol.24 No.1, pp.67 - 83

Received: 04 Nov 2019
Accepted: 21 Jan 2020
Published online: 04 Dec 2020 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article