Distributed Application Provisioning over Ethereum based private and permissioned Blockchain: Availability modeling, capacity, and costs planning
Carlos Melo, Jamilson Dantas, Paulo Pereira, Paulo Maciel
TL;DR
This work addresses provisioning distributed applications on Ethereum-based private and permissioned blockchains by developing and evaluating availability, capacity-oriented availability (COA), and cost-planning models for Docker-enabled cloud and private infrastructures. It combines Reliability Block Diagrams and Stochastic Petri Nets to capture dependencies among servers, Docker containers, and Ethereum nodes, and it employs sensitivity analyses to identify bottlenecks. Three case studies demonstrate how availability, COA, and cost vary with hardware, containerization, and cloud choices, revealing that multi-node configurations can achieve ultra-high availability but at higher costs, while private clouds offer favorable long-term economics under certain conditions. The framework provides practical guidance for Blockchain-as-a-Service deployments, informing architectural choices, capacity planning, and economic trade-offs in both public and private settings.
Abstract
Blockchain and Cloud Computing are two of the main topics related to the distributed computing paradigm, and in the last decade, they have seen exponential growth in their adoption. Cloud computing has long been established as the main mechanism to test, develop, and deliver new applications and services in a distributed manner across the World Wide Web. Large data centers host many services and store petabytes of user data. Infrastructure and services owners rule the access to data and may even be able to change contents and attest to its veracity. Blockchain is a step towards a future where the user's data are considered safer, besides being public. Advances in blockchain-based technologies, now, support service provisioning over permissioned and private infrastructures. Therefore, organizations or groups of individuals may share information, service even if they do not trust each other, besides supporting infrastructure management tasks. This paper presents and evaluates models for assessing the availability and capacity-oriented availability of cloud computing infrastructures. It aims at running Blockchain's distributed applications based on the Ethereum blockchain platform and the required expenses to perform service delivery in public and private infrastructures. Most of the obtained results also apply to other blockchains based platforms.