Basic Principles of Osmotic Computing: Secure and Dependable MicroElements (MELs) Orchestration Leveraging Blockchain Facilities

Abstract

In recent years, the rapid development of Cloud, Edge and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies has accelerated the advancement trends forcing applications and information systems (IS) to evolve. In this new ecosystem, ISs are federated and usually highly distributed becoming complex and very dynamic that have to extend not only through the Cloud/Edge and IoT layers but also the federated organizational boundaries. In this context, Osmotic Computing (OC) is a new paradigm driven by the significant increase in capacity/capability of resources in highly distributed and federated environments, that solves problems related to the deployment, networking and security of microservices called MicroElements (MEL) that are composed and interconnected over Cloud/Edge and IoT infrastructures with specified levels of QoS and security constraints. In this federated collaborative system, each organization needs to have proper administration and security policies to maintain data security while allowing selective sharing of resources. Classical models of access control are not effective in protecting resources while allowing users to access to the resources within their privileges. Blockchain is an underlying technology that could help organizations to improve access control systems through consensus mechanisms, and underlying features of immutability, transparency, auditability, and cryptography. In this work, we propose a MELs orchestration approach through a Software Defined Membrane (SDMem) that leverages Blockchain facilities obeying the osmosis principles.