Decentralized Edge Clouds

Cloud computing services are traditionally deployed on centralized computing infrastructures confined to a few data centers, while cloud applications run in a single data center. However, the cloud´s centralized nature can be limiting in terms of performance and cost for applications where users, data, and computation are distributed. The authors present an overview of distributed clouds that might be better suited for such applications. They briefly describe the distributed cloud landscape and introduce Nebula, a highly decentralized cloud that uses volunteer edge resources. The authors provide insights into some of its key properties and design issues, and describe a distributed MapReduce application scenario to illustrate the benefits and trade-offs of using distributed and decentralized clouds for distributed data-intensive computing applications.