The Nubo Virtual Services Marketplace

TL;DR

Nubo is a blockchain-based virtual services marketplace that enables trustworthy, decentralized management of cloud services through smart contracts, microservices, and a web portal, demonstrating competitive performance and rich functionality.

Contribution

Introduction of Nubo, a decentralized marketplace leveraging Quorum blockchain and smart contracts for secure cloud service management with scalable microservices architecture.

Findings

Saranyu blockchain microservice is competitive with OpenStack Keystone.

Nubo provides a richer set of tenant and service management features.

Performance and scalability data support practical deployment.

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a virtual services marketplace, called Nubo, designed to connect buyers of virtual services (or tenants) with providers of those services on a cloud computing platform. The marketplace is implemented as a collection of distributed microservices along with a marketplace portal that runs as a Web application. The heart of Nubo is the Saranyu tenant and service management microservice. Saranyu is a decentralized application (dApp) built on top of the J.P. Morgan Quorum blockchain. Tenant and service accounts are represented as static (nonnegotiable) smart contracts written in the Solidity language. Quorum provides a tamper evident and tamper resistant distributed ledger, whereby multiple cloud and service providers can co-operate to provide service resources to tenants in a trustworthy fashion. Services offer resources consisting of a collection of attributes describing what the tenant can consume, and tenants subscribe to service resources through the Nubo Marketplace portal. The Service Manager microservice provides multitenant support for containerized services built for deployment and orchestration using Docker that were originally not designed to be managed through Saranyu. We discuss our design goals for Nubo, describe the overall architecture, discuss some details on how Saranyu uses the blockchain and smart contracts, and provide comprehensive performance and scalability data measured on the Saranyu REST API. The results indicate Saranyu is competitive with published results for comparable operations on the Havana release of OpenStack Keystone, but Saranyu provides a much richer collection of tenant and service management functionality than Keystone.