Despite the benefits of decentralized applications in terms of resilience and privacy, the overwhelming majority of applications with mainstream adoption are provided in a centralized manner. We argue that this is due to the direct benefits to the developer that centralization provides in terms of performance, monetization, and deployability. In this paper we introduce a new model, untrusted delegation, which joins the simplified deployment model of centralization with the benefits of decentralization. In this model, we decouple administrative ownership from administrative management, and leverage the existence of either a private cloud infrastructure, or a public cloud provider that acts as a neutral third party, that is augmented to support decentralization. Our initial prototype integrates with the Digital Ocean API and as a proof-of-concept, we can deploy Tor relay nodes with users only needing to sign up for a Digital Ocean account.

Given that Software-Defined Networking is highly successful in solving many of today's manageability, flexibility, and scalability issues in large-scale networks, in this paper we argue that the concept of SDN can be extended even further. Many applications (esp. stream processing and big-data applications) rely on graph-based inter-process communication patterns that are very similar to those in computer networks. To our mind, this network abstraction spanning over different types of entities is highly suitable for and would benefit from central (SDN-inspired) control for the same reasons classical networks do. In this work, we investigate the commonalities between such intra-host networks and classical computer networking. Based on this, we study the feasibility of a central network controller that manages both network traffic and intra-host communication over a custom bus system.