Workflow-as-a-Service Cloud Platform and Deployment of Bioinformatics Workflow Applications

Workflow management systems (WMS) support the composition and deployment of workflow-oriented applications in distributed computing environments. They hide the complexity of managing large-scale applications, which includes the controlling data pipelining between tasks, ensuring the application's execution, and orchestrating the distributed computational resources to get a reasonable processing time. With the increasing trends of scientific workflow adoption, the demand to deploy them using a third-party service begins to increase. Workflow-as-a-service (WaaS) is a term representing the platform that serves the users who require to deploy their workflow applications on third-party cloud-managed services. This concept drives the existing WMS technology to evolve towards the development of the WaaS cloud platform. Based on this requirement, we extend CloudBus WMS functionality to handle the workload of multiple workflows and develop the WaaS cloud platform prototype. We implemented the Elastic Budget-constrained resource Provisioning and Scheduling algorithm for Multiple workflows (EBPSM) algorithm that is capable of scheduling multiple workflows and evaluated the platform using two bioinformatics workflows. Our experimental results show that the platform is capable of efficiently handling multiple workflows execution and gaining its purpose to minimize the makespan while meeting the budget.