Blockchain databases were designed to improve trust in centralized ecosystems, which dominate the market today, by introducing tamper-evidence features on top of a classical database. Compared to decentralized ledger technologies, blockchain databases are easier to use, and they can significantly reduce the operational and development costs. However, the existing blockchain databases do not equip multiple parties with tools to efficiently control common data written to the ledger. This paper describes Orion, a new open source blockchain database that introduces multi-sig and proof capabilities with extensive key-level access control, which enable parties to mutually control and validate a value written to the database. These unique capabilities, together with additional blockchain properties, provide users with features such as tamper-evidence, provenance, data lineage, authenticity, and non-repudiation, while using a standard data model and transactional APIs. We found our technology to be extremely useful in improving the integrity of a system and reducing mistakes, disputes, and fraud.

Cloud computing handles a vast share of the world's computing, but it is not as efficient as it could be due to its lack of support for memory elasticity. An environment that supports memory elasticity can dynamically change the size of the application's memory while it's running, thereby optimizing the entire system's use of memory. However, this means at least some of the applications must be memory-elastic. A memory elastic application can deal with memory size changes enforced on it, making the most out of all of the memory it has available at any one time. The performance of an ideal memory-elastic application would not be hindered by frequent memory changes. Instead, it would depend on global values, such as the sum of memory it receives over time.

Suboptimal resource utilization among public and private cloud providers prevents them from maximizing their economic potential. Long-term allocated resources are often idle when they might have been subleased for a short period. Alternatively, arbitrary resource overcommitment may lead to unpredictable client performance.