Guest Editorial: Special Issue on P2P Cloud Systems

Excerpt

Since the success of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (a.k.a. EC2), the concept of cloud computing has been quickly adapted worldwide, from major content providers (such as Google and Microsoft), solution providers to small business enterprise. In contrast to traditional Internet services, cloud computing provides not only storage capacity, but also computing powers. It allows end-users to access data from anywhere at anytime. It equips enterprises with IT solutions at low cost. Such computing services are supported by large data and processing centers that may or may not located at the same location. Despite the massive computing power, storage capacity and great flexibility, cloud computing is facing challenges in sustainability, privacy, security, robustness, data migration, throughput, and many more. Harnessing all the distributed storage and power together in a seamless architecture is also a great challenge. To address these, peer-to-peer (P2P) techniques have been proposed, e.g., in data centers, at the core as overlay network, and at the edge of the cloud, so that cloud services can be provided in the most effective manner. …