Simba: Tunable end-to-end data consistency for mobile apps

Abstract

Developers of cloud-connected mobile apps need to ensure the consistency of application and user data across multiple devices. Mobile apps demand different choices of distributed data consistency under a variety of usage scenarios. The apps also need to gracefully handle intermittent connectivity and disconnections, limited bandwidth, and client and server failures. The data model of the apps can also be complex, spanning inter-dependent structured and unstructured data, and needs to be atomically stored and updated locally, on the cloud, and on other mobile devices. In this paper we study several popular apps and find that many exhibit undesirable behavior under concurrent use due to inadequate treatment of data consistency. Motivated by the shortcomings, we propose a novel data abstraction, called a sTable, that unifies a tabular and object data model, and allows apps to choose from a set of distributed consistency schemes; mobile apps written to this abstraction can effortlessly sync data with the cloud and other mobile devices while benefiting from end-to-end data consistency. We build Simba, a data-sync service, to demonstrate the utility and practicality of our proposed abstraction, and evaluate it both by writing new apps and porting existing inconsistent apps to make them consistent. Experimental results show that Simba performs well with respect to sync latency, bandwidth consumption, server throughput, and scales for both the number of users and the amount of data.