Subtitle: The clash of the buzzword titans!
Peer-to-peer (P2P) and cloud computing, two of the Internet trends of the last decade, hold similar promises: the (virtually) infinite availability of computing and storage resources. But there are important differences: the cloud provides highly-available resources, but at a cost; P2P resources are for free, but their availability is affected by churn. Together with Luca Abeni, Hannah Kavalionak and Benedikt Elser we have investigating a novel approach for the construction of dependable applications, using the cloud to provide highly-available and durable services, while exploiting “free” P2P resources when available. The novelty of our idea stems from the clever combination of the gossip paradigm with a storage cloud, that allows to keep the monetary cost of the cloud always under control, in the presence of just one peer or with a million of them. These ideas have been first presented in Kyoto during [P2P11] and later extended in [IWSOS12]. We have later applied these ideas to massively multiuser online games, in cooperation with the University of Pisa [PPNA15], and to the NAT-traversal problem [SAC16].
In 2015, Pedro Garcia Lopez, Dick Epema, Anwitaman Datta, Teruo Higashino, Adriana Iamnitchi, Marinho Barcellos, Pascal Felber, and Etienne Riviere and I wrote a position paper about edge-centric computing [SIGCOMM15].
[P2P11] Alberto Montresor and Luca Abeni. Cloudy weather for P2P, with a chance of gossip. In Proc. of the 11th IEEE P2P Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P’11), pages 250–259. IEEE, August 2011. Best paper award. [PDF],[Bibtex].
[IWSOS12] Hanna Kavalionak and Alberto Montresor. P2P and cloud: A marriage of convenience for replica management. In Proc. of the 7th IFIP Int. Workshop on Self-Organizing Systems (IWSOS’12), number 7166 in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 60–71. Springer, Delft, The Netherlands, March 2012. [PDF], [Bibtex].
[PPNA15] Hanna Kavalionak, Emanuele Carlini, Laura Ricci, Alberto Montresor, and Massimo Coppola. Integrating peer-to-peer and cloud computing for massively multiuser online games. Peer-to-Peer Networking and Application, 8(2):301–319, 2015. [PDF], [Bibtex].
[SAC16] Hanna Kavalionak, Amir Payberah, Alberto Montresor, and Jim Dowling. NATCloud: Cloud-assisted NAT-traversal service. In Proc. of the 31st Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC’16. ACM, Pisa, Italy, April 2016. [PDF], [Bibtex].
[SIGCOMM15] Pedro Garcia Lopez, Alberto Montresor, Dick Epema, Anwitaman Datta, Teruo Higashino, Adriana Iamnitchi, Marinho Barcellos, Pascal Felber, and Etienne Riviere. Edge-centric computing: Vision and challenges. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev., 45(5):37–42, September 2015. [PDF], [Bibtex].