A Serverless Distributed Ledger for Enterprises

TL;DR

This paper proposes a serverless, cloud-native distributed ledger designed to meet enterprise requirements for data sharing, offering ease of deployment, low costs, and scalability suitable for real-time applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel serverless distributed ledger architecture tailored for enterprises, addressing limitations of existing blockchain systems and integrating seamlessly with cloud environments.

Findings

The proposed ledger is easy to deploy and cost-effective.

It offers latency and scalability suitable for real-time enterprise applications.

Enterprises heavily reliant on cloud providers find this approach acceptable.

Abstract

Enterprises have been attracted by the capability of blockchains to provide a single source of truth for workloads that span companies, geographies, and clouds while retaining the independence of each party's IT operations. However, so far production applications have remained rare, stymied by technical limitations of existing blockchain technologies and challenges with their integration into enterprises' IT systems. In this paper, we collect enterprises' requirements on distributed ledgers for data sharing and integration from a technical perspective, argue that they are not sufficiently addressed by available blockchain frameworks, and propose a novel distributed ledger design that is "serverless", i.e., built on cloud-native resources. We evaluate its qualitative and quantitative properties and give evidence that enterprises already heavily reliant on cloud service providers would consider such an approach acceptable, particularly if it offers ease of deployment, low transactional cost structure, and a combination of latency and scalability aligned with real-time IT application needs.