One of the main drawbacks and hindering factors in the process envisioned by Pledger is the lack of cross-layer knowledge (and the inability to exchange it) that is enforced upon the involved roles:
- the IaaS Providers that require improved awareness on the types of applications executed by their customers,
- the Adopters/Consumers (e.g. SaaS providers) of infrastructure services, that require improved awareness on the types of physical nodes their applications will be executed on.
Pledger introduces necessary improvements across this value chain by following a black box approach in all the involved layers, in order to adapt to the specifics of the ecosystems in question and the corresponding lack of knowledge. Thus, the proposed approach does not assume any kind of Adopter-Provider interaction, but all the necessary information is extracted via non-intrusive methods, abiding to this role separation imposed by the Cloud business model.
Areas 1, 2 and 4 represent all the infrastructure, technologies and services provided in the domains of Edge, Fog and Cloud storage/computing respectively. Area 6 corresponds to all the applications (Adopters) that are executed on the infrastructure. In a sense, these applications are competing for these resources and may have strikingly different needs between them. Pledger will enable the extension of the Edge/Cloud combined business model and provide an extensive replicability and best practices framework, thus covering a wide area of Applications.
The project provides toolkits to both the (infrastructure) providers and the application developers (adopters), bridging the chasm between Areas 5 and 7. By offering a toolkit to both parties, the black box approach mentioned above is achieved, resulting in an easy mapping of resources capabilities to specific application needs. Pledger’s Core Services (Area 8) ensure that this takes place in an optimised manner. Areas 1 and 2 can be further enhanced through Blockchain/Ledger technologies (Area 3). These technologies can provide secure communication and transaction capabilities, enabling the formation of ad hoc networks between devices (at the Edge layer) or nodes (at the Fog level) collaborating with each other for the initialisation and execution of a specific application.
