Orchestrating centralised service-oriented workflows presents significant
scalability challenges that include: the consumption of network bandwidth,
degradation of performance, and single points of failure. This paper presents a
high-level dataflow specification language that attempts to address these
scalability challenges. This language provides simple abstractions for
orchestrating large-scale web service workflows, and separates between the
workflow logic and its execution. It is based on a data-driven model that
permits parallelism to improve the workflow performance. We provide a
decentralised architecture that allows the computation logic to be moved
"closer" to services involved in the workflow. This is achieved through
partitioning the workflow specification into smaller fragments that may be sent
to remote orchestration services for execution. The orchestration services rely
on proxies that exploit connectivity to services in the workflow. These proxies
perform service invocations and compositions on behalf of the orchestration
services, and carry out data collection, retrieval, and mediation tasks. The
evaluation of our architecture implementation concludes that our decentralised
approach reduces the execution time of workflows, and scales accordingly with
the increasing size of data sets.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the IEEE 2013 7th International Workshop
on Scientific Workflows, in conjunction with IEEE SERVICES 201
