Blockchain-Based Federated Cloud Environment

Abstract

Over the past decade, service provisioning in federated cloud environments (FCE) through multiple cloud service providers (CSP) is distributed among multi-cloud users (CU). In such ecosystems, multiple broker entities facilitate seamless performance and delivery of cloud services among CU and CSP in FCE. However, due to the exchange of information through public heterogeneous channels, the service transactions among cloud stakeholders are bounded by security issues such as privacy, the authenticity of stakeholders, chronology among transactions, and responsive availability of CSP. Thus, in such peer decentralized ecosystems, the blockchain (BC) framework is applicable to solve the aforementioned issues. BC also automates the Service level agreement (SLA) contracts between CU and CSP through smart contract (SC) execution as logical software codes. In the same direction, the proposed survey addresses the gaps in earlier multi-cloud surveys and discusses a BC-based secure broker provisioning framework for performance and security parameters, concerning associated attack vectors. The proposed survey presents a detailed analysis of different existing solutions and proposes a solution taxonomy for service provisioning in BC-envisioned cloud ecosystems. The survey also identifies the research challenges for industry professionals, academicians, and the research community, to build scalable services for CUs in FCE.