Immutable Log Storage as a Service

Logs contain critical information about the quality of the rendered services on the Cloud and can be used as digital evidence. Hence, we argue that the critical nature of logs calls for immutability and verification mechanism without the presence of a single trusted party. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based log system, called Logchain, which can be integrated with existing private and public blockchains. To validate the mechanism, we create Logchain as a Service (LCaaS) by integrating it with Ethereum public blockchain network. We show that the solution is scalable (being able to process 100 log files per second) and fast (being able to "seal" a log file in 23 seconds, on average)

Dogfooding: use IBM Cloud services to monitor IBM Cloud infrastructure

The stability and performance of Cloud platforms are essential as they directly impact customers' satisfaction. Cloud service providers use Cloud monitoring tools to ensure that rendered services match the quality of service requirements indicated in established contracts such as service-level agreements. Given the enormous number of resources that need to be monitored, highly scalable and capable monitoring tools are designed and implemented by Cloud service providers such as Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft. Cloud monitoring tools monitor millions of virtual and physical resources and continuously generate logs for each one of them. Considering that logs magnify any technical issue, they can be used for disaster detection, prevention, and recovery. However, logs are useless if they are not assessed and analyzed promptly. Thus, we argue that the scale of Cloud-generated logs makes it impossible for DevOps teams to analyze them effectively. This implies that one needs to automate the process of monitoring and analysis (e.g., using machine learning and artificial intelligence). If the automation will witness an anomaly in the logs --- it will alert DevOps staff. The automatic anomaly detectors require a reliable and scalable platform for gathering, filtering, and transforming the logs, executing the detector models, and sending out the alerts to the DevOps staff. In this work, we report on implementing a prototype of such a platform based on the 7-layered architecture pattern, which leverages micro-service principles to distribute tasks among highly scalable, resources-efficient modules. The modules interact with each other via an instance of the Publish-Subscribe architectural pattern. The platform is deployed on the IBM Cloud service infrastructure and is used to detect anomalies in logs emitted by the IBM Cloud services, hence the dogfooding

Immutable Log Storage as a Service on Private and Public Blockchains

Service Level Agreements (SLA) are employed to ensure the performance of Cloud solutions. When a component fails, the importance of logs increases significantly. All departments may turn to logs to determine the cause of the issue and find the party at fault. The party at fault may be motivated to tamper with the logs to hide their role. We argue that the critical nature of Cloud logs calls for immutability and verification mechanism without the presence of a single trusted party. This paper proposes such a mechanism by describing a blockchain-based log storage system, called Logchain, which can be integrated with existing private and public blockchain solutions. Logchain uses the immutability feature of blockchain to provide a tamper-resistance platform for log storage. Additionally, we propose a hierarchical structure to address blockchains' scalability issues. To validate the mechanism, we integrate Logchain into Ethereum and IBM Blockchain. We show that the solution is scalable and perform the analysis of the cost of ownership to help a reader select an implementation that would address their needs. The Logchain's scalability improvement on a blockchain is achieved without any alteration of blockchains' fundamental architecture. As shown in this work, it can function on private and public blockchains and, therefore, can be a suitable alternative for organizations that need a secure, immutable log storage platform.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Services Computin