Orchestrating service-oriented workflows is typically based on a design model
that routes both data and control through a single point - the centralised
workflow engine. This causes scalability problems that include the unnecessary
consumption of the network bandwidth, high latency in transmitting data between
the services, and performance bottlenecks. These problems are highly prominent
when orchestrating workflows that are composed from services dispersed across
distant geographical locations. This paper presents a novel workflow
partitioning approach, which attempts to improve the scalability of
orchestrating large-scale workflows. It permits the workflow computation to be
moved towards the services providing the data in order to garner optimal
performance results. This is achieved by decomposing the workflow into smaller
sub workflows for parallel execution, and determining the most appropriate
network locations to which these sub workflows are transmitted and subsequently
executed. This paper demonstrates the efficiency of our approach using a set of
experimental workflows that are orchestrated over Amazon EC2 and across several
geographic network regions.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 7th International Conference
on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC 2014
