Distributed clouds for collaborative applications

Abstract

With the advent of social networking and the appearance of Web 2.0, collaborative applications which allow users to share data online, often in real-time, have gained increasing prominence. Whether for sharing images, sharing videos, or even sharing live gaming sessions, such applications must deal with session sizes from tens to tens of thousands of people. However, existing products have not been able to provide a scalable cloud-based system that synchronizes disparate web content among many users. Such a goal is desired in order to provide the benefits of cloud deployments to collaborative applications. Many such applications cannot predict the number of connections which they may need to handle. As such, applications must either provision a higher number of servers in anticipation of more traffic, or be faced with a degradation of the user experience when a large number of clients connect to the application. Cloud-based deployments can alleviate these issues by allowing the application's server base to scale automatically with user demand. A cloud deployment can also distribute servers throughout different geographic locations in order to offer improved latency and response times to its clients. This paper will present an architecture for a distributed, collaborative, and server-based application. The application is deployed inside a distributed cloud environment, which consists of multiple clouds in various geographic locations.