Simba: Building Data-Centric Applications for Mobile Devices

Personal smart devices have become ubiquitous. Millions of innovative apps run on our tablets, smart phones, and smart watches, bringing these devices to life. Whether the app provides photo sharing, heart-rate monitoring, collaborative editing, or even gaming, managing data locally on the devices and remotely through various cloud-based services is crucial in defining the user experience. In the near future, the needs of the apps running on tens of billions of networked smart devices will further exacerbate the challenges with managing data. Much of the value proposition, and the burden, will also rest with the cloud infrastructure to provide quick responses to queries, personalize and recommend through analytics, and allow seamless access to content. To build “data-centric” applications spanning the devices and the cloud, developers need high-level abstractions for managing data. My talk will focus on the systems infrastructure that powers such applications.

In this talk, I will present evidence as to why existing data abstractions, for local storage, are counter-productive for performance, and for network transfer, are inadequate for consistency, efficiency, and programmability. I will present a study of several popular mobile apps on Android, including ones that use commercial sync services, where we found the apps to be unreliable, losing and corrupting user data, and inconsistent, under concurrent use. I will then present Simba, a data-management platform built for mobile apps with tunable end-to-end consistency. Simba’s table abstraction unifies both structured and unstructured data, and enables developers to write and deploy quality apps with ease.