Blockchain system enforces cloud service penalties automatically
A Penalty-Aware, Blockchain-based Cloud Monitoring System
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Summary
Cloud services have agreements that say how reliable and available they should be. If these rules are broken, the service provider must pay a penalty to the user. The authors created a system using blockchain technology that watches the cloud services and automatically pays penalties when the rules are broken. They tested their system with Amazon and Azure cloud services using a specific blockchain platform.
What this means in practice
- •For cloud service providers: Automatically enforce penalty payments for service violations to maintain trust and transparency with customers.
- •For cloud service consumers: Receive automatic compensation when cloud service agreements are violated without manual claims or disputes.
Authors
Christian Dienbauer, Benedikt Pittl, Erich Schikuta
Abstract
Today, traded cloud services are governed by service-level agreements that specify providers' obligations, such as availability and reliability. Violations of service-level agreements result in penalty payments. The recent development of prominent cloud platforms, such as the redesign of Amazon's spot marketspace, underpins a trend towards dynamic cloud markets where consumers continuously migrate their services across different marketspaces and providers to reach a cost optimum. This leads to a heterogeneous IT infrastructure and, consequently, complicates monitoring of delivered service quality. Hence, there is a need for a transparent penalty management system that ensures consumers automatically receive penalty payments from providers for service violations. In this paper, we present a cloud monitoring system that can autonomously execute penalty payments. In this regard, we use smart contracts hosted on blockchains that continuously monitor cloud services and trigger penalty payments to consumers in the event of service violations. For justification and evaluation, we implement our approach using the IBM Hyperledger Fabric framework and create a use case with Amazon and Azure cloud services to illustrate the universal design of the presented mechanism.