A Best-Effort Mechanism for Service Deployment in Contributory Computer Systems

This paper presents a simple decentralized service deployment mechanism that can be used to offer services with high availability by using contributed resources with variable, possibly very low availability. It uses little information about the state of the group, and provides best-effort results. Contributory computer systems are those where users provide their own resources to be used collectively. Contributory applications are complex to build, as they have to deal with issues like unpredictable individual resource availability, heterogeneity and ease of use, as well as the complexities derived from their own functionalities. This complexity can be alleviated by creating a middleware for the creation of contributory communities that allows the use of contributed resources in a decentralized way through service deployment.