An Architecture for Decentralised Orchestration of Web Service Workflows

TL;DR

This paper proposes a decentralised architecture for executing web service workflows, aiming to improve scalability and reduce network and failure issues by partitioning workflows and executing fragments closer to services.

Contribution

It introduces a novel decentralised orchestration architecture that partitions workflows into fragments for remote execution, addressing scalability and performance challenges.

Findings

Reduces network bandwidth consumption

Improves workflow execution scalability

Decreases single points of failure

Abstract

Service-oriented workflows are typically executed using a centralised orchestration approach that presents significant scalability challenges. These challenges include the consumption of network bandwidth, degradation of performance, and single-points of failure. We provide a decentralised orchestration architecture that attempts to address these challenges. Our architecture adopts a design model that permits the computation to be moved "closer" to services in a workflow. This is achieved by partitioning workflows specified using our simple dataflow language into smaller fragments, which may be sent to remote locations for execution.