  This review focuses on the evolution of cloud computing and distributed
ledger technologies (blockchains) over the last decade. Cloud computing relies
mainly on a conceptually centralized service provisioning model, while
blockchain technologies originate from a peer-to-peer and a completely
distributed approach. Still, noteworthy commonalities between both approaches
are often overlooked by researchers. Therefore, to the best of the authors
knowledge, this paper reviews both domains in parallel for the first time. We
conclude that both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. The advantages
of centralized service provisioning approaches are often the disadvantages of
distributed ledger approaches and vice versa. It is obviously an interesting
question whether both approaches could be combined in a way that the advantages
can be added while the disadvantages could be avoided. We derive a software
stack that could build the foundation unifying the best of these two worlds and
that would avoid existing shortcomings like vendor lock-in, some security
problems, and inherent platform dependencies.
