A Serverless Distributed Ledger for Enterprises
This addresses the problem of enabling blockchain adoption for enterprise data sharing and integration, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing cloud technologies.
The paper tackled the problem of enterprises struggling to adopt blockchains for data sharing due to technical limitations and integration challenges, proposing a serverless distributed ledger design built on cloud-native resources and evaluating its qualitative and quantitative properties to show acceptability for enterprises reliant on cloud services.
Enterprises have been attracted by the capability of blockchains to provide a single source of truth for workloads that span companies, geographies, and clouds while retaining the independence of each party's IT operations. However, so far production applications have remained rare, stymied by technical limitations of existing blockchain technologies and challenges with their integration into enterprises' IT systems. In this paper, we collect enterprises' requirements on distributed ledgers for data sharing and integration from a technical perspective, argue that they are not sufficiently addressed by available blockchain frameworks, and propose a novel distributed ledger design that is "serverless", i.e., built on cloud-native resources. We evaluate its qualitative and quantitative properties and give evidence that enterprises already heavily reliant on cloud service providers would consider such an approach acceptable, particularly if it offers ease of deployment, low transactional cost structure, and a combination of latency and scalability aligned with real-time IT application needs.