Section: New Software and Platforms

SwiftCloud

Participants : Mahsa Najafzadeh, Marc Shapiro [correspondent] , Serdar Tasiran, Marek Zawirski.

Client-side (e.g., mobile or in-browser) apps need local access to shared cloud data, but current technologies either do not provide fault-tolerant consistency guarantees, or do not scale to high numbers of unreliable and resource-poor clients, or both. Addressing this issue, the SwiftCloud distributed object database supports high numbers of client-side partial replicas. SwiftCloud offers fast reads and writes from a causally-consistent client-side cache. It is scalable, thanks to small and bounded metadata, and available, tolerating faults and intermittent connectivity by switching between data centres. The price to pay is a modest amount of staleness. A recent Inria Research Report (submitted for publication) presents the SwiftCloud algorithms, design, and experimental evaluation, which shows that client-side apps enjoy the same guarantees as a cloud data store, at a small cost.

SwiftCloud is supported by the ConcoRDanT ANR project (Section  8.1.7 ), by a Google Research Award, and by the FP7 grant SyncFree (Section  8.2.1.1 ).

The code is freely available on http://gforge.inria.fr/ under a BSD license.