A Taxonomy and Survey of Fault-Tolerant Workflow Management Systems in Cloud and Distributed Computing Environments

During the recent years, workflows have emerged as an important abstraction for collaborative research and managing complex large-scale distributed data analytics. Workflows are increasingly becoming prevalent in various distributed environments, such as clusters, grids, and clouds. These environments provide complex infrastructures that aid workflows in scaling and parallel execution of their components. However, they are prone to performance variations and different types of failures. Thus, workflow management systems need to be robust against performance variations and tolerant against failures. Numerous research studies have investigated fault-tolerant aspect of the workflow management system in different distributed systems. In this study, we analyze these efforts and provide an in-depth taxonomy of them. We present the ontology of faults and fault-tolerant techniques then position the existing workflow management systems with respect to the taxonomies and the techniques. In addition, we classify various failure models, metrics, tools, and support systems. Finally, we identify and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the current techniques and provide recommendations on future directions and open areas for the research community.