Sacbe: A building block approach for constructing efficient and flexible end-to-end cloud storage

End-to-end solutions enable users to protect their data, before sending them to the cloud, from confidentiality violations, service outages and vendor lock-in incidents. These solutions however require the integration and orchestration of multiple applications that affect the end-user service experience. This paper presents Sacbe, an approach for building efficient and flexible end-to-end cloud storage based on building blocks (BB), which are logical representations of independent applications encapsulated into containers. The developers can build structures such as pipelines, stacks and/or clusters of applications by chaining BBs through I/O interfaces. These structures enable users to move/process data/metadata in continuous dataflows from their devices to the cloud and enables organizations to build cloud storage services. We implemented a complete realization of an end-to-end cloud storage solution, which includes pipelines of BBs running on client-side for end-users to ensure in-house the confidentiality and reliability of data as well as stacks and clusters of BBs to build authentication, sharing, and storage services in a private cloud. This prototype was evaluated through controlled experimentation and a case study based on a satellite imagery, which revealed the feasibility of end-to-end solutions built with Sacbe as the end-user service experience was significantly improved in comparison with other solutions.