On-Demand Resource Provisioning for BPEL Workflows Using Amazon´s Elastic Compute Cloud

BPEL is the de facto standard for business process modeling in today´s enterprises and is a promising candidate for the integration of business and Grid applications. Current BPEL implementations do not provide mechanisms to schedule service calls with respect to the load of the target hosts. In this paper, a solution that automatically schedules workflow steps to underutilized hosts and provides new hosts using Cloud computing infrastructures in peak-load situations is presented. The proposed approach does not require any changes to the BPEL standard. An implementation based on the ActiveBPEL engine and Amazon´s Elastic Compute Cloud is presented.