Cloud computing offers dynamic allocation of resources on demand, the feature which makes it to stand apart providing great performance, scalability, cost efficient and less maintenance, thus making it an apt choice. Task scheduling becomes the essential factor in increasing the performance for the dynamic allocation of resources which is most essential in the cloud environment to increase performance and decrease the cost. In this work, a solution is proposed using makespan and cost, taking them as important constraints for the optimization problem. We have merged two algorithms namely, cuckoo search algorithm (CSA) and oppositional based learning (OBL) and created a new hybrid algorithm called oppositional cuckoo search algorithm (OCSA) to provide solution to the above stated issue. Our proposed OCSA algorithm showed noticeable improvement over the other task scheduling algorithms. The proposed work is simulated in cloudsim programming environment and the simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed work by minimizing cost and makespan parameters. The obtained results are better in comparison to other existing algorithms like particle swarm optimization (PSO), Improved Differential Evolution Algorithm (IDEA) and genetic algorithm (GA). © 2018 Intelligent Network and Systems Society.