Symbiotic Coupling of P2P and Cloud Systems: The Wikipedia Case

Cloud computing offers high availability, dynamic scalability, and elasticity requiring only very little administration. However, this service comes with financial costs. Peer-to-peer systems, in contrast, operate at very low costs but cannot match the quality of service of the cloud. This paper focuses on the case study of Wikipedia and presents an approach to reduce the operational costs of hosting similar websites in the cloud by using a practical peer-to-peer approach. The visitors of the site are joining a Chord overlay, which acts as first cache for article lookups. Simulation results show, that up to 72% of the article lookups in Wikipedia could be answered by other visitors instead of using the cloud.