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Estimating the Cost for Executing Business Processes in the Cloud

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Business Process Management Forum (BPM 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 260))

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Abstract

Managing and running business processes in the Cloud changes how Workflow Management Systems (WfMSs) are deployed. Consequently, when designing such WfMSs, there is a need of determining the sweet spot in the performance vs. resource consumption trade-off. While all Cloud providers agree on the pay-as-you-go resource consumption model, every provider uses a different cost model to gain a competitive edge. In this paper, we present a novel method for estimating the infrastructure costs of running business processes in the Cloud. The method is based on the precise measurement of the resources required to run a mix of business process in the Cloud, while accomplishing expected performance requirements. To showcase the method we use the BenchFlow framework to run experiments on a widely used open-source WfMS executing custom workload with a varying number of simulated users. The experiments are necessary to reliably measure WfMS’s performance and resource consumption, which is then used to estimate the infrastructure costs of executing such workload on four different Cloud providers.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://camunda.org/.

  2. 2.

    http://faban.org.

  3. 3.

    https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/api/docker_remote_api_v1.22/#get-container-stats-based-on-resource-usage.

  4. 4.

    https://github.com/camunda/camunda-consulting.

  5. 5.

    http://www.slideshare.net/alfresco/introduction-to-activiti-bpm.

  6. 6.

    https://hub.docker.com/r/camunda/camunda-bpm-platform/.

  7. 7.

    https://hub.docker.com/_/mysql/.

  8. 8.

    https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/.

  9. 9.

    https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines.

  10. 10.

    https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing.

  11. 11.

    http://springs.io/pricing-list/.

  12. 12.

    The prices in Table 5 are from March 2016 and are subject to change.

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Acknowledgments

This work is partially funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation with the BenchFlow - A Benchmark for Workflow Management Systems (Grant Nr. 145062).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Informatics, USI Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland

    Vincenzo Ferme, Ana Ivanchikj & Cesare Pautasso

Authors
  1. Vincenzo Ferme
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  2. Ana Ivanchikj
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  3. Cesare Pautasso
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Vincenzo Ferme .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Queensland University of Technology , Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Marcello La Rosa

  2. DFKI, Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken, Saarland, Germany

    Peter Loos

  3. Universidad Politècnica de Valencia , Valencia, Spain

    Oscar Pastor

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Ferme, V., Ivanchikj, A., Pautasso, C. (2016). Estimating the Cost for Executing Business Processes in the Cloud. In: La Rosa, M., Loos, P., Pastor, O. (eds) Business Process Management Forum. BPM 2016. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 260. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45468-9_5

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