ViePEP-C: A Container-Based Elastic Process Platform

Abstract

Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) need to be able to take into account the fluctuating demand for computational resources during the execution of business process activities. Today, BPMS rely on the leasing and releasing of virtual machines (VMs) on cloud resources, which leads to a rather coarse-grained allocation of computational resources. This may result in an increase in the execution cost, flexibility restrictions, and a negative impact on the Quality of Service. In order to overcome these drawbacks, we introduce the Vienna Platform for Elastic Processes on Containers (ViePEP-C). ViePEP-C is an elastic BPMS that uses containers instead of VMs for the execution of business process activities on cloud resources, leading to a more fine-grained execution environment. To achieve this, ViePEP-C offers cloud controller, monitoring and business process execution functionalities and provides a platform for different resource and task scheduling algorithms. To evaluate the benefits of ViePEP-C, we further present a resource and task scheduling algorithm and show that, by using containers as execution environment, the execution cost can be decreased by over 20 percent (compared to a state-of-the-art VM-based scheduling algorithm) while considering a high service level.