Towards Distributed Clouds

TL;DR

This paper reviews the evolution of cloud computing and blockchain technologies, highlighting their similarities, differences, and potential for integration to combine their advantages and mitigate their disadvantages.

Contribution

It provides a parallel review of cloud and blockchain domains and proposes a software stack to unify their benefits while avoiding key shortcomings.

Findings

Both approaches have complementary advantages and disadvantages.

A unified software stack could mitigate issues like vendor lock-in and security problems.

The paper suggests a pathway for integrating centralized and decentralized computing models.

Abstract

This review focuses on the evolution of cloud computing and distributed ledger technologies (blockchains) over the last decade. Cloud computing relies mainly on a conceptually centralized service provisioning model, while blockchain technologies originate from a peer-to-peer and a completely distributed approach. Still, noteworthy commonalities between both approaches are often overlooked by researchers. Therefore, to the best of the authors knowledge, this paper reviews both domains in parallel for the first time. We conclude that both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. The advantages of centralized service provisioning approaches are often the disadvantages of distributed ledger approaches and vice versa. It is obviously an interesting question whether both approaches could be combined in a way that the advantages can be added while the disadvantages could be avoided. We derive a software stack that could build the foundation unifying the best of these two worlds and that would avoid existing shortcomings like vendor lock-in, some security problems, and inherent platform dependencies.