Decentralized Application Infrastructures as Smart Contract Codes

Abstract

With the recent advance in concepts like decentralized "cloud" and blockchain-enabled decentralized computing environments, the legacy modeling and orchestration tools developed to support centrally managed cloud-based ICT infrastructures are challenged by such a new paradigm built on top of decentralization. On the other hand, decentralized "cloud" and computing infrastructures need to support many Dapp use cases. As the complexity of these targeted application scenarios increases, there is an urgent need for developing automation and modeling tools for deploying and managing decentralized infrastructures. Instead of creating such tools from scratch, a natural approach is extending mature infrastructure modeling tools for Dapps and decentralized computing environments. To this end, in this work, we have developed extensions to the TOSCA domain-specific language to support smart contract specification of decentralized computing infrastructures for supporting Dapps, where smart contracts or chain codes manage a decentralized computing environment. The result is blockchain-based orchestration and automation for decentralized "cloud" and computing environments, which is a step forward for achieving full decentralization in general-purpose computing.