P2P vs Cloud

Subtitle: The clash of the buzzword titans!

Peer-to-peer (P2P) and cloud com­pu­ting, two major Internet trends of the last deca­de, hold simi­lar pro­mi­ses: the (vir­tual­ly) unli­mi­ted avai­la­bi­li­ty of com­pu­ting and sto­ra­ge resour­ces. However, impor­tant dif­fe­ren­ces exi­st: the cloud pro­vi­des highly avai­la­ble resour­ces, but at a mone­ta­ry cost; P2P resour­ces are avai­la­ble at no cost, but their avai­la­bi­li­ty is affec­ted by churn.

Together with Luca Abeni, Hannah Kavalionak, and Benedikt Elser, we inve­sti­ga­ted a novel approach to con­struc­ting depen­da­ble appli­ca­tions by leve­ra­ging the cloud to ensu­re highly avai­la­ble and dura­ble ser­vi­ces, whi­le exploi­ting P2P resour­ces whe­ne­ver they are avai­la­ble. The novel­ty of our pro­po­sal lies in the inte­gra­tion of the gos­sip para­digm with a sto­ra­ge cloud, which ena­bles the mone­ta­ry cost of the cloud to be kept under control—whether in the pre­sen­ce of a sin­gle peer or of mil­lions. These ideas were fir­st pre­sen­ted in Kyoto at [P2P11] and later exten­ded in [IWSOS12]. We sub­se­quen­tly applied them to mas­si­ve­ly mul­tiu­ser onli­ne games, in col­la­bo­ra­tion with the University of Pisa [PPNA15], and to the pro­blem of NAT tra­ver­sal [SAC16].

In 2015, Pedro Garcia Lopez, Dick Epema, Anwitaman Datta, Teruo Higashino, Adriana Iamnitchi, Marinho Barcellos, Pascal Felber, Etienne Riviere, and I co-autho­red a posi­tion paper on edge-cen­tric com­pu­ting [SIGCOMM15].


[P2P11Alberto 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 ComputingSAC’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].

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