Towards Distributed Clouds: A Review About the Evolution of Centralized Cloud Computing, Distributed Ledger Technologies, and A Foresight on Unifying Opportunities and Security Implications

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.

Leveraging Blockchain Technology to Break the Cloud Computing Market Monopoly

“…This model of decentralized clouds opens new opportunities and has recently gained attention by both academia and industry. In [31], there is a survey that discusses the pros and cons of both traditional cloud deployments and blockchains and comes up with a proposal for the architecture that decentralized clouds should have. CloudAgora's design is in accordance with the main principles presented in [31].…”

“…In [31], there is a survey that discusses the pros and cons of both traditional cloud deployments and blockchains and comes up with a proposal for the architecture that decentralized clouds should have. CloudAgora's design is in accordance with the main principles presented in [31]. Similar approaches in the competition landscape include blockchain-based projects that offer storage and/or compute services.…”

A Brief History of Cloud Application Architectures

“…The author does not think that those cloud application architectures will strive for the same level of decentralizing and distribution like peer-to-peer based approaches. However, a more distributed service-to-service trend is observable in cloud application architecture research [60]. Thus, the cloud computing trend started a decline in SOA (see Figure 11) and P2P (see Figure 10).…”

A Survey on Blockchain-Based Self-Sovereign Patient Identity in Healthcare

“…The motivation to apply BC solutions compared to the client-server network services is that BC promises security, reliability, timeliness and efficiency due to being decentralized and also eliminating many intermediaries in the formal procedures. But, according to the authors of [8], the third generation of BC must define a new software engineering paradigm and Cloud architecture design in order to enhance existing Cloud solutions with decentralized/distributed features. On existing BC implementations, data storage and computation are still expensive and limited, mainly because the technology is new and there are still many open security challenges.…”

“…Limited features ensure controllability of early developed solutions. Therefore, authors in [8] recommend combining DLT and Cloud solutions to capture the advantages of both. Other challenges that stand on the way of wide acceptance of BC by businesses are performance, user-friendliness, openness, administration and costeffectiveness [9].…”