Patent US 9,852,013

An apparatus includes a processor and a storage storing instructions causing the processor to: maintain a federated area; receive a request to perform a job flow with a data set from a remote device; retrieve a job flow definition specifying the tasks of the job flow from the federated area; determine whether there is an instance log in the federated area generated by a previous performance of the job flow with the data set; in response to there being such an instance log, retrieve the version specified in the instance log of each task routine for each task from the federated area; in response to there being no such instance log, retrieve the most recent version of each task routine; perform the job flow with the retrieved versions of the task routines and the data set to generate a result report; and provide the result report to the remote device.