A workflow scheduling technique using genetic algorithm in spot instance-based cloud

Cloud computing is a computing paradigm in which users can rent computing resources from service providers according to their requirements. A spot instance in cloud computing helps a user to obtain resources at a lower cost. However, a crucial weakness of spot instances is that the resources can be unreliable anytime due to the fluctuation of instance prices, resulting in increasing the failure time of users’ job. In this paper, we propose a Genetic Algorithm (GA)-based workflow scheduling scheme that can find the optimal task size of each instance in a spot instance-based cloud computing environment without increasing users’ budgets. Our scheme reduces total task execution time even if an out-of-bid situation occurs in an instance. The simulation results, based on a before-and-after GA comparison, reveal that our scheme achieves performance improvements in terms of reducing the task execution time on average by 7.06%. Additionally, the cost in our scheme is similar to that when GA is not applied. Therefore, our scheme can achieve better performance than the existing scheme, by optimizing the task size allocated to each available instance throughout the evolutionary process of GA.