Paper Info
Title
A novel blockchain protocol for selecting microservices providers and auditing contracts
Abstract
Software architectures based on containers and microservices are often used to develop and manage large-scale distributed applications. Still, large vertical deployments spanning over multiple cloud and edge infrastructures are cumbersome to negotiate for, as each infrastructure provider is usually unique concerning prices, management strategies and Quality-of-Service (QoS) levels. In this scenario, Service Level Agreement (SLA) contracts are primarily crafted through pre-established templates and clients must trust providers to manage provisioned resources. The present paper proposes Dawn, a novel blockchain protocol for selecting microservice providers and auditing contracts. The protocol exploits the distributed and verifiable storage of a blockchain, as well as its decentralized consensus to enable contracts establishments in unreliable environments. Besides providing a formal definition of the protocol, this work discusses the possible threats to the correct operation of the network, originated by tenants and providers. We show that Dawn is secure under the evaluated terms, that it can efficiently help the contract establishment process as well as it guarantees a functional systematic way of auditing through monitoring. Finally, we studied both best and worst case scenarios regarding the number of issued messages, stored data volume and network traffic to execute Dawn with different numbers of clients and providers.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1016/j.jss.2021.111030
Journal of Systems and Software
Keywords
DocType
Volume
00-01,99-00
Journal
180
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0164-1212
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Wilton Jaciel Loch100.34
Guilherme Koslovski25611.30
Maurício Aronne Pillon377.59
Charles Miers4155.57
Marcelo Pasin518117.37