Giving wings to your data: A first experience of Personal Cloud interoperability

Abstract Personal Clouds are becoming increasingly popular storage services for end-users and organizations. However, the competition among Personal Clouds, their proprietary nature and the heterogeneity of synchronization protocols have led to a complete lack of interoperability among them. Regrettably, this situation impedes that users share data transparently across multiple providers. Even worse, the lack of interoperability has associated serious risks, such as vendor lock-in , in which users get trapped in a single provider due to the cost of switching to another one. In this work, we contribute DataWings : The first interoperability protocol for Personal Clouds. DataWings consists of an authentication management protocol and a storage API for file storage, synchronization and sharing that adhere to the current authentication (OAuth) and REST standards, respectively. Moreover, we demonstrate the feasibility of DataWings by implementing the protocol in various providers (NEC, StackSync, eyeOS) and performing a real deployment evaluated with real trace replays of production systems (UbuntuOne, NEC). To our knowledge, this is the first real-world experience of Personal Cloud interoperability. Our experiments provide new insights on the performance implications that different types of user activity and the underlying sharing network topology have on the implementation of our protocol. We conclude that DataWings is flexible enough to leverage interoperability for heterogeneous Personal Clouds, opening the door for a broader adoption by other vendors.