Continuous, Trustless, and Fair: Changing Priorities in Services Computing

Services computing research and practice traditionally has focused on the objectives of business alignment, software systems interoperability and on leveraging the Web as a compute platform. Corresponding technology solution stacks and architectural styles have been promoted. Today, and probably for the next decade to come, different objectives are replacing these original ones and, correspondingly, different solution stacks and architectural styles are emerging. Most notably, challenges such as frequent delivery of service systems, decentralization and business disintermediation, and “socially aligned” service systems lead us to continuous computing, trustless computing, and fair computing – three major trends that we expect to become the driving force behind next-generation service systems. In this paper, we discuss these trends and identify major research directions to deliver on these changing priorities.