CWOM: a lightweight cloud-oriented workflow optimisation middleware

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.