Augmenting cloud architectures to support decentralized applications

Abstract

Despite the benefits of decentralized applications in terms of resilience and privacy, the overwhelming majority of applications with mainstream adoption are provided in a centralized manner. We argue that this is due to the direct benefits to the developer that centralization provides in terms of performance, monetization, and deployability. In this paper we introduce a new model, untrusted delegation, which joins the simplified deployment model of centralization with the benefits of decentralization. In this model, we decouple administrative ownership from administrative management, and leverage the existence of either a private cloud infrastructure, or a public cloud provider that acts as a neutral third party, that is augmented to support decentralization. Our initial prototype integrates with the Digital Ocean API and as a proof-of-concept, we can deploy Tor relay nodes with users only needing to sign up for a Digital Ocean account.