AkôFlow is a middleware designed for the execution of scientific workflows in containerized environments. Built on the Kubernetes platform and leveraging Docker containers, AkôFlow provides a solution that enables scientists to explore the parallel execution of activities with provenance data support. It allows for greater flexibility, scalability, and portability in executing workflows across various infrastructures, such as high-performance clusters and cloud services, without requiring specific adaptations or complex manual processes.

What problem does AkôFlow solve?

Many scientific workflows generate large volumes of data and are computationally intensive, requiring distributed environments and parallelism techniques to reduce execution time. Although there are existing workflow systems, such as Pegasus and SciCumulus, and container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, none are specifically tailored to handle scientific workflows in containerized environments. Challenges such as:

• Managing multiple containers with varying capacities and dependencies;
• Portability across different infrastructures;
• Efficient capture of provenance data;
• Optimized resource scheduling;
• Minimizing errors when combining multiple containers manually;

Are common obstacles for scientists and engineers. AkôFlow addresses these limitations by integrating container management with direct support for scientific workflows, streamlining both execution and result analysis.

Key Benefits of AkôFlow:

• Portability: Supports workflow execution across different infrastructures that use Kubernetes.
• Flexibility: Manages multiple containers with customizable CPU, memory, and disk configurations.
• Scalability: Efficient workflow execution with support for scheduling algorithms.
• Provenance: Captures metrics and logs, enabling detailed execution analysis.

AkôFlow is particularly valuable for researchers who need to execute their workflows in distributed environments without dealing with the complexities of infrastructure configuration and management.