Distributed application provisioning over Ethereum-based private and permissioned blockchain: availability modeling, capacity, and costs planning

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.