A Workflow Management System to Enforce QoS in IaaS Cloud Environments

Today, the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud environments represent a market share on which many big economical players (Amazon, Microsoft, Rack space) are converging. The hetereogenity and the degree of customization of Cloud features and funcionalities supplied, the different pricing model adopted, the different QoS strategies proposed to the customer make this market very fragmented. Within this context, the workflows represent a common models to describe both business and scientific enterprise application. This paper proposes a novel modular workflow management system called IWoM (Iaas Workflow Manager) that can work with different (public or private) IaaS platforms. Through IWoM a Cloud provider can offer to its customers a simple way to compose a workflow, associate to it with a set of QoS parameters, automatically deploy it on a IaaS middleware and handle all the operations related with the QoS provisioning. To probe the benefits of IWoM, authors analyse the deployment of workflows on the PRISMA platform, a cloud infrastructure oriented to the the provision, control and monitoring of business process belonging to EU public administrations.