Dynamic Resource Provisioning for Interactive Workflow Applications on Cloud Computing Platform

Cloud computing opens new opportunities for application providers because with the policy "add as needed and pay as used" they can economize the cost for computing resources. In cloud environments, issues such as resource allocation and dynamic resource provisioning based on users' QoS constraints are yet to be addressed for interactive workflow applications. This paper develops an effective load metric, remaining tasks, for interactive workflow applications. Based on this metric load dispatching and dynamic resource provisioning approaches are proposed which outperform existing methods under a series of simulation evaluations. Experimental results show that the proposed approaches offer application providers better maintenance of QoS-satisfied response time under time-varying workload, at the minimum cost of resource usage.