Towards a Democratic Federation for Infrastructure Service Provisioning

The current implementations of federated clouds depend on a central broker that takes care of the resource allocation as well as scheduling and pricing for the shared resources under the federation. In this paper, we propose an alternate architecture for federated Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provisioning with the help of a completely decentralized marketplace designed using the blockchain technology. The proposed architecture is free from any central broker and supports decentralization, transparency of resource exchanges, autonomy of service providers, immutability in information exchange for dispute-free billing and fairness for service provisioning. An in-house implementation of the proposed architecture with three cloud service providers shows that CloudChain indeed supports resource allocation fairness while achieving almost similar service provisioning performance compared to a central broker based federation architecture.