STARCloud | Bringing Quality of Service to Blockchain-Based Clouds

Summary
Today the cloud market is restricted to few providers, which entails higher prices, vendor lock-in and lower service quality. Smart Contracts (SC) and blockchain could reshape this market since they lower costs and provide trust without resorting to intermediaries. This paradigm, named blockchain-based clouds, prevents vendor lock-in and has the potential to make market's barriers so low that anyone with idle or spare computational resources can offer cloud services. The STARCloud project systematically utilises formal methods for the static analysis and runtime control of the next generation clouds for creating support for Quality of Service (QoS). To this aim, since the state-of-the-art solutions cannot be used in this domain, this project provides novel approaches and tools, including consensus mechanisms, a domain specific language for QoS definitions and QoS formal analysis tools, and a framework for the matchmaking and negotiation of SCs. Supporting QoS will boost the adoption of decentralised clouds; thus reducing prices and environmental impact; and improving QoS, which make the cloud providers and consumers that use blockchain-based clouds more competitive, specially in Europe, where the most advanced commercial solutions are located. Moreover, these solutions will enable geographically sparse micro and traditional cloud providers to join the market, which will leverage cloud and edge computing in Europe. The project is timely and, besides involving collaborators from many of the best European research institutes, it is supervised by I. Brandic, one of the main cloud experts in the world and actively involves one of the main players in the market: iExec. Overall, the solutions proposed here will contribute to the disruptive blockchain-based cloud paradigm and find immediate use in industry and academia by addressing the fundamental requirement of most cloud consumers, in particular business: QoS definition and enforcement in completely distributed systems.
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More information & hyperlinks
Web resources: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/838949
Start date: 10-06-2019
End date: 09-06-2021
Total budget - Public funding: 186 167,04 Euro - 186 167,00 Euro
Cordis data

Original description

Today the cloud market is restricted to few providers, which entails higher prices, vendor lock-in and lower service quality. Smart Contracts (SC) and blockchain could reshape this market since they lower costs and provide trust without resorting to intermediaries. This paradigm, named blockchain-based clouds, prevents vendor lock-in and has the potential to make market's barriers so low that anyone with idle or spare computational resources can offer cloud services. The STARCloud project systematically utilises formal methods for the static analysis and runtime control of the next generation clouds for creating support for Quality of Service (QoS). To this aim, since the state-of-the-art solutions cannot be used in this domain, this project provides novel approaches and tools, including consensus mechanisms, a domain specific language for QoS definitions and QoS formal analysis tools, and a framework for the matchmaking and negotiation of SCs. Supporting QoS will boost the adoption of decentralised clouds; thus reducing prices and environmental impact; and improving QoS, which make the cloud providers and consumers that use blockchain-based clouds more competitive, specially in Europe, where the most advanced commercial solutions are located. Moreover, these solutions will enable geographically sparse micro and traditional cloud providers to join the market, which will leverage cloud and edge computing in Europe. The project is timely and, besides involving collaborators from many of the best European research institutes, it is supervised by I. Brandic, one of the main cloud experts in the world and actively involves one of the main players in the market: iExec. Overall, the solutions proposed here will contribute to the disruptive blockchain-based cloud paradigm and find immediate use in industry and academia by addressing the fundamental requirement of most cloud consumers, in particular business: QoS definition and enforcement in completely distributed systems.

Status

TERMINATED

Call topic

MSCA-IF-2018

Update Date

28-04-2024
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Horizon 2020
H2020-EU.1. EXCELLENT SCIENCE
H2020-EU.1.3. EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
H2020-EU.1.3.2. Nurturing excellence by means of cross-border and cross-sector mobility
H2020-MSCA-IF-2018
MSCA-IF-2018