Workload Scheduling in Fog and Cloud Environments: Emerging Concepts and Research Directions.

In recent years, we have been witnessing the growing adoption of infrastructure virtualization technologies and cloud computing. A wide range of applications has been migrated from traditional computing environments to the cloud. On the other hand, organizations with existing on-premises infrastructure investments are making the shift to hybrid cloud, in order to leverage the security provided by the private cloud and the virtually unlimited resources of the public cloud. With the rapid expansion of the Internet of Things, fog computing emerged as a new paradigm, extending the cloud to the network edge, closer to where the data are generated. The workloads on such platforms tend to be complex, featuring various degrees of parallelism. Consequently, one of the major challenges involved with fog and cloud computing, is the effective and efficient scheduling of the workload. In this chapter, we provide the necessary background in this field and present an overview of the emerging concepts and techniques, exploring future research directions.