Digital Ecosystems in the Clouds: Towards Community Cloud Computing

TL;DR

This paper explores Community Cloud Computing, leveraging Digital Ecosystems principles to address privacy, resilience, and sustainability concerns associated with traditional cloud services.

Contribution

It proposes a novel community-based cloud architecture inspired by Digital Ecosystems, highlighting its potential to improve control, security, and environmental impact.

Findings

Community Cloud Computing offers an alternative to traditional cloud models.

Challenges include managing latency, resource distribution, and security.

The approach emphasizes environmental sustainability and user control.

Abstract

Cloud Computing is rising fast, with its data centres growing at an unprecedented rate. However, this has come with concerns of privacy, efficiency at the expense of resilience, and environmental sustainability, because of the dependence on Cloud vendors such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Community Cloud Computing makes use of the principles of Digital Ecosystems to provide a paradigm for Clouds in the community, offering an alternative architecture for the use cases of Cloud Computing. It is more technically challenging to deal with issues of distributed computing, such as latency, differential resource management, and additional security requirements. However, these are not insurmountable challenges, and with the need to retain control over our digital lives and the potential environmental consequences, it is a challenge we must pursue.