ALLSTAR: A Blockchain Based Decentralized Ecosystem for Cloud and Edge Computing

Last decades, Cloud computing has made significant impacts on traditional applications to change their development and operation methods. We witnessed ever more newly-built Clouds and data centers. However, the centralized management mechanism of current Clouds lacks the dispersion to satisfy the requirements of emerging collaborative applications, including AI, IoT, and autopilot. On the other hand, the Edge computing stays at the conceptual and experimental stage. Most organizations construct their own Edge nodes to operate applications. An efficient and incentive mechanism is missing to motivate the Edge and micro Cloud resource providers to join and constitute a more generalized and decentralized ecosystem. To address this issue, we propose ALLSTAR, a blockchain based architecture for equally combining all the Cloud and Edge resources to be seamlessly leveraged by the application in the DevOps (development and operations) lifecycle. The ALLSTAR architecture is a systematic solution to realize the "Cloud+Edge" management and contributes to constructing the corresponding ALLSTAR ecosystem. This paper describes the overall architecture of ALLSTAR, the related key techniques, and detailed application DevOps processes as well as the new business model.