A study of workflow management systems in the cloud environment

Cloud computing ensures service flexibility, scalable storage of data, and high performance to users whose numbers are increasing by the day. It has enhanced its role in distributed computing systems by offering superior internet services that augment and complete functionalities of grid computing, web-enabled distributed computing, and peer-to-peer networks. Workflow for analysing data along with pre-processing tools, distributed datasets, knowledge models, and data mining algorithms are used for eliciting information of value from data, which is often a complicated process. Since cloud systems offer storage and processing services that are scalable, along with a software platform for creating a data analysis environment, they could be efficiently utilised to manage workflows for data analysis. In this paper, the various management systems of visual workflow, which are suitable for a cloud environment, are discussed.