A Survey on Scheduling Strategies for Workflows in Cloud Environment and Emerging Trends

Workflow scheduling is one of the challenging issues in emerging trends of the distributed environment that focuses on satisfying various quality of service (QoS) constraints. The cloud receives the applications as a form of a workflow, consisting of a set of interdependent tasks, to solve the large-scale scientific or enterprise problems. Workflow scheduling in the cloud environment has been studied extensively over the years, and this article provides a comprehensive review of the approaches. This article analyses the characteristics of various workflow scheduling techniques and classifies them based on their objectives and execution model. In addition, the recent technological developments and paradigms such as serverless computing and Fog computing are creating new requirements/opportunities for workflow scheduling in a distributed environment. The serverless infrastructures are mainly designed for processing background tasks such as Internet-of-Things (IoT), web applications, or event-driven applications. To address the ever-increasing demands of resources and to overcome the drawbacks of the cloud-centric IoT, the Fog computing paradigm has been developed. This article also discusses workflow scheduling in the context of these emerging trends of cloud computing.