Section: New Software and Platforms

SwiftCloud

Functional Description

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.

• Participants: Marc Shapiro, Serdar Tasiran, Marek Zawirski and Mahsa Najafzadeh

• Contact: Marc Shapiro

• URL: git+ssh://scm.gforge.inria.fr//gitroot/swiftcloud