Cloudy weather for P2P, with a chance of gossip

Peer-to-peer (P2P) and cloud computing, two of the Internet trends of the last decade, hold similar promises: the (virtually) infinite availability of computing and storage resources. But there are important differences: the cloud provides highly-available resources, but at a cost; P2P resources are for free, but their availability is shaky. Several academic and commercial projects have explored the possibility of mixing the two, creating a large number of peer-assisted applications, particularly in the field of content distribution, where the cloud provides a highly-available and persistent service, while P2P resources are exploited for free whenever possible to reduce the economic cost. While executing active servers on elastic computing facilities like Amazon EC2 and pairing them with user-provided peers is definitely one way to go, this paper proposes a novel approach that further reduces the economic cost. Here, a passive storage service like Amazon S3 is exploited not only to dis...