Monetary Cost Optimizations for Hosting Workflow-as-a-Service in IaaS Clouds

Recently, we have witnessed workflows from science and other data-intensive applications emerging on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds, and many workflow service providers offering workflow-as-a-service (WaaS). The major concern of WaaS providers is to minimize the monetary cost of executing workflows in the IaaS clouds. The selection of virtual machines (instances) types significantly affects the monetary cost and performance of running a workflow. Moreover, IaaS cloud environment is dynamic, with high performance dynamics caused by the interference from concurrent executions and price dynamics like spot prices offered by Amazon EC2. Therefore, we argue that WaaS providers should have the notion of offering probabilistic performance guarantees for individual workflows to explicitly expose the performance and cost dynamics of IaaS clouds to users. We develop a scheduling system called Dyna to minimize the expected monetary cost given the user-specified probabilistic deadline guarantees. Dyna includes an A*-based instance configuration method for performance dynamics, and a hybrid instance configuration refinement for using spot instances. Experimental results with three scientific workflow applications on Amazon EC2 and a cloud simulator demonstrate (1) the ability of Dyna on satisfying the probabilistic deadline guarantees required by the users; (2) the effectiveness on reducing monetary cost in comparison with the existing approaches.