Diamond: Automating Data Management and Storage for Wide-Area, Reactive Applications

Users of today’s popular wide-area apps (e.g., Twitter, Google Docs, and Words with Friends) must no longer save and reload when updating shared data; instead, these applications are reactive, providing the illusion of continuous synchronization across mobile devices and the cloud. Achieving this illusion poses a complex distributed data management problem for programmers. This paper presents the first reactive data management service, called Diamond, which provides persistent cloud storage, reliable synchronization between storage and mobile devices, and automated execution of application code in response to shared data updates. We demonstrate that Diamond greatly simplifies the design of reactive applications, strengthens distributed data sharing guarantees, and supports automated reactivity with low performance overhead.