A Comparative Evaluation of Blockchain Systems for Application Sharing Using Containers

The Cloud computing paradigm is built on the concept of virtualization, allowing multiple virtual machines to cohabit on one physical device to enable the scaling up and down of applications through elastic on-demand provisioning. More recently containers e.g. Docker, have been shown to enable a more lightweight mechanism than hypervisors and proved to be a viable alternative for virtualization, based on shared operating systems. The advent of such lightweight environments has brought a multitude of application uses in research, science and industry, enabling pre-configured operating environments to be shared, reused and instantiated on demand. The sharing of containers has currently been exposed using centralized repositories (e.g. Dockerhub), which allows containers to be shared and to form the building blocks for further development. In this paper, we take a look at the next evolution of this lifecycle and consider whether it is viable to securely share container-based applications within a decentralized group of individuals and to provide an audit trail recording exactly who has shared what, and with whom. For this purpose we consider the use of Blockchain technologies, and consequently perform a comparative analysis of Blockchain technologies for this use case. The paper provides mostly a review and taxonomy of different ledger systems, which we believe may be of interest to the SafeData Workshop participants.