Mobile Applications and RESTful Web Services

  

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I have been thinking about mobile apps a lot lately.  Many of our engagements with customers involve a conversation about mobile applications and how Atmos, our 'net native cloud storage platform, can enable secure access to data over the disparate and inherently public networks where mobile users operate.  Moreover, Atmos addresses the challenge of efficiently delivering content to these users over mixed networks and from disparate locations.

Mobile users are not always on the same network.  At one moment they're at the office using a secured wireless access point that runs over a corporate network.  At other times they're at an airport using 3G data service from a carrier.  Or perhaps they're at home using semi-trusted wireless access to the Internet.  Of course, that's the very definition of being mobile.

It all has me convinced of one important concept:  mobile apps want to talk to the storage layer using web services. Mobile apps are not using NFS and CIFS to access content --- certainly not directly at least.  Using CIFS and NFS simply wouldn't work over mixed network types and has a host of security implications.

Using CIFS and NFS results in tethering users to particular networks and topologies.  It just wasn't designed for this new world of ubiquitous access to content.

The type of content that mobile users consume and create is largely unstructured consisting of documents, images, audio, video, etc.

The mobile apps could use web services to talk to an application server that acts as a proxy between the mobile app and the storage layer, but that's not always the most efficient method. 

That's not to say that mobile applications won't and shouldn't talk to an application server at all.  There will still be database persistence layers that will routinely need to be accessed, but mobile users aren't generating a significant amount of structured data anyway.

That's where Atmos helps.  Atmos is built with RESTful web services at its core.  It's designed to efficiently handle unstructured content for mobile and web applications and doesn't have any inherent limitations on how and where users can consume content. And it does this all securely, efficiently, and in a cost effective manner.

Atmos untethers your users.  Let us know if we can help.

Photo by Alexis Nyal Photography