A distributed cloud connecting multiple, geographically distributed and smaller datacenters, can be an attractive alternative to today’s massive, centralized datacenters. A distributed cloud can reduce communication overheads, costs, and latencies by offering nearby computation and storage resources. Better data locality can also improve privacy. In this paper, we revisit the vision of distributed cloud computing, and identify different use cases as well as research challenges. This article is based on the Dagstuhl Seminar on Distributed Cloud Computing, which took place in February 2015 at Schloss Dagstuhl.

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