Makespan and Security-Aware Workflow Scheduling for Cloud Service Cost Minimization Using Firefly Optimizer

Abstract

As efficient commercial information technology, cloud computing has attracted more and more users to submit their requests to the cloud platform and pay for them based on the amount and quality of services. One of the most important concerns of cloud service providers is to minimize the monetary cost for completing users’ requests while meeting constraints on the quality of services such as makespan and security. To solve this concern, this paper proposes a makespan and security-aware workflow scheduling method based on an improved firefly optimizer that consists of a new solution initialization scheme, a firefly position updating scheme, a firefly-to-solution mapping operator, and two task-to-virtual machine assignment schemes. We carry out extensive simulation experiments on real-world workflows to validate our proposed workflow scheduling method. The results reveal that the monetary cost reduction achieved by our method can be up to 54.0% compared to a baseline and two state-of-the-art approaches.