Cloud computing has been one of the disruptive technologies to change the traditional application operation for the last decades. The success of Cloud boosts ever more newly-built data centers. Although these data centers are distributed all around the world, the computing resources are managed in a relatively centralized manner within one big data center. For a specific small area, the centralized Cloud lacks the dispersion to satisfy the requirements of collaborative applications, e.g., the nearest data center might still be too far to satisfy the network latency. Through spreading the computing resources at the edge of the network, the emerging Edge computing can complete the data processing before uploading to Cloud. However, Edge computing still stays at the conceptual and experimental stage. Trust and incentive model are missing to motivate the Edge node and micro Cloud owners to share the computing infrastructure resources for building a more generalized and decentralized ecosystem. Traditional method of building trust through authority is not applicable in current edge environment, which is more like peer-to-peer relationship between the customer and provider. To tackle this issue, ALLSTAR is proposed, which is a blockchain-based approach to enhance the trust for equally combining all the Cloud and Edge resources to be seamlessly leveraged by the application. The ALLSTAR approach is a systematic solution to realize decentralized resource management, including Cloud and Edge resource sharing and trading, and target at building the trustworthy ALLSTAR ecosystem. In this paper, we first analyze the challenges of utilizing distributed Cloud and Edge resources, and describe the overall architecture of ALLSTAR, including the related key techniques, detailed application development and operations processes as well as the new business model. Moreover, an empirical study on the permissioned blockchain evaluation is conducted. The study not only demonstrates the ALLSTAR approach is feasible but also provides insights of which blockchain to choose when constructing such an ecosystem.

在过去的几十年里，云计算一直是改变传统应用程序操作的颠覆性技术之一。云的成功推动了更多新建的数据中心。虽然这些数据中心分布在世界各地，但计算资源在一个大数据中心内以相对集中的方式进行管理。对于特定的小区域，集中式云缺乏满足协同应用需求的分散性，例如，最近的数据中心可能仍然太远，无法满足网络延迟。新兴的边缘计算通过将计算资源分散在网络边缘，可以完成数据上传到云端之前的处理。然而，边缘计算仍停留在概念和实验阶段。缺少信任和激励模型来激励边缘节点和微云所有者共享计算基础设施资源以构建更通用和去中心化的生态系统。传统的通过权限建立信任的方法不适用于当前的边缘环境，这更像是客户和提供商之间的点对点关系。为了解决这个问题，提出了 ALLSTAR，这是一种基于区块链的方法，用于增强信任，以平等地结合所有云和边缘资源，以供应用程序无缝利用。ALLSTAR方式是实现去中心化资源管理的系统化解决方案，包括Cloud和Edge资源共享和交易，旨在构建值得信赖的ALLSTAR生态系统。在本文中，我们首先分析了利用分布式云边缘资源的挑战，描述了ALLSTAR的整体架构，包括相关的关键技术、详细的应用开发和运营流程以及新的商业模式。此外，对许可区块链评估进行了实证研究。该研究不仅证明了 ALLSTAR 方法是可行的，而且还提供了在构建这样一个生态系统时选择哪个区块链的见解。