Abstract
Existing blockchain smart contract platforms are designed as monolithic architectures. Even though there are multiple smart contracts with fully independent business logic, they run on a single monolithic container. This dependence on a monolithic container can be a performance bottleneck during the processing of a large number of transactions. To address this challenge, microservice-based architecture is adopted in the blockchain smart contracts by introducing a novel architecture to run independently on separate microservices. The new smart contract architecture is built on top of Mystiko blockchain, a functional programming and actor-based “Aplos” concurrent smart contract platform. Aplos is identified as a “Smart Actor” platform since it is built using Actor-based concurrency handling. Based on the philosophy of microservices, the Aplos Smart Actor platform on Mystiko blockchain is redesigned. This architecture is introduced as “SaaS - Smart actors as a service”. With SaaS, different Aplos smart actors in the blockchain are deployed as separate independent services (e.g. docker containers) instead of a single monolith service. This ensures different smart actors can execute transactions independently. An additional benefits to SaaS is that the architecture increases the scalability by guaranteeing concurrent execution of transactions, producing high transaction throughput on the blockchain.
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Bandara, E. et al. (2021). SaaS - Microservices-Based Scalable Smart Contract Architecture. In: Thampi, S.M., Wang, G., Rawat, D.B., Ko, R., Fan, CI. (eds) Security in Computing and Communications. SSCC 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1364. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-0422-5_16
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