Moving from Centralized to Decentralized Application Development
Mottier, Geoffrey (2022)
Mottier, Geoffrey
2022
All rights reserved. This publication is copyrighted. You may download, display and print it for Your own personal use. Commercial use is prohibited.
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe2022061346223
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe2022061346223
Tiivistelmä
Decentralized application, also known as DApps, is another way of building web-based applications. Currently, the majority of web applications serve all the features through self-hosted centralized servers and, lately, it has become more common to see these features deployed on cloud services such as Amazon Web Service (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and AZURE. Cloud services are largely used as they offer many services to help, secure and speed up the development process. Decentralized applications (DApp) allow applications to be built without central authorities. In a centralized architecture, the lack of a middleman would mean that any sort of data would not be immutable. Blockchain technology has been built to solve this issue, as blockchains are by default immutable without middleman reliability. Just like blockchains, decentralized protocols such as InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) can be used to help DApp development for storing assets like images.
This thesis aims to identify the capabilities of the blockchain ecosystem to be able to support web application development. Specifically, it will analyze challenges that are needed to build an android/ios application based on a decentralized architecture with tools available in 2022. To be able to measure the difficulties of it, a minimum viable product will be built in both centralized services and decentralized technology. The applications will not be able to produce the exact same user experience and features, as a public/private key authentication has to be made by the user to store data on blockchain as well as engage a payment flow to be able to write his data on an ethereum blockchain.
Unfortunately, blockchains and decentralized protocols are known to be slow, expensive and a bottleneck, which will be measured and analyzed in light of the recent upgrade of available blockchains on the market, from proof of work to proof of stake, which gives performance and cost improvement.
Overall, this thesis will shed light on the state of decentralized applications by measuring their advantages, disadvantages, and challenges in relation to cloud services and specifically Amazon's AWS.
This thesis aims to identify the capabilities of the blockchain ecosystem to be able to support web application development. Specifically, it will analyze challenges that are needed to build an android/ios application based on a decentralized architecture with tools available in 2022. To be able to measure the difficulties of it, a minimum viable product will be built in both centralized services and decentralized technology. The applications will not be able to produce the exact same user experience and features, as a public/private key authentication has to be made by the user to store data on blockchain as well as engage a payment flow to be able to write his data on an ethereum blockchain.
Unfortunately, blockchains and decentralized protocols are known to be slow, expensive and a bottleneck, which will be measured and analyzed in light of the recent upgrade of available blockchains on the market, from proof of work to proof of stake, which gives performance and cost improvement.
Overall, this thesis will shed light on the state of decentralized applications by measuring their advantages, disadvantages, and challenges in relation to cloud services and specifically Amazon's AWS.