A Comparative Analysis of Task Scheduling Approaches in Cloud Computing

Recently, cloud computing has emerged as a primary enabling technology to provide compute, storage, platform, and analytics services to end-users and organizations based on pay-as-you-use. In essence, cloud provides agility, availability, scalability, and resiliency. However, increased number of users leads to issues such as scheduling of requests, demands, and work-load efficiency over the available cloud resources. Similarly, since the inception of cloud computing, task scheduling is reckoned as an essential ingredient in the commercial value of this technology. Task scheduling is considered as an NP-hard problem in cloud computing and different solutions exist in the literature to address this issue. In this paper, we investigate and empirically compare some of the recent state-of-the-art scheduling mechanisms in cloud computing with respect to Makespan (the time difference between the start and finish of a sequence of jobs or tasks) and throughput (number of tasks successfully executed per unit time (Makespan)). We then extend the comparison by evaluating the considered approaches with respect to Average Resource Utilization Ratio (ARUR). We also recommend and identify factors that can improve resource utilization and maximize revenue-generation for cloud service providers.