Commercial Cloud Services for a Robust Mobile Application Backend Data Storage Folasade M

1 Indonesian Journal of Computing, Engineering, and Design (IJoCED) 3 (1) (2021) 31-45 Indonesian Journal of Computing, Engineering, and Design Journal homepage: http://ojs.sampoernauniversity.ac.id/index.php/IJOCED Commercial Cloud Services for a Robust Mobile Application Backend Data Storage Folasade M. Dahunsi1”, John Idogun1, Abayomi Olawumi2 1 Computer Engineering Department, Federal University of Technology Akure, P.M.B. 704, Akure, Nigeria 2 Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department, Federal University of Technology Akure, P.M.B. 704, Akure, Nigeria Correspondence: E-mail: [email protected] A B S T R A C T A R T I C L E I N F O Article History: Rapid advancements in the infrastructure of Information and Received 28 Dec 2020 Communication Technology (ICT) have led to radically new but Revised 12 Feb 2021 ubiquitous technology; cloud computing. Cloud computing has Accepted 08 Mar 2021 gracefully emerged offering services that possess on-demand Available online 11 Mar 2021 scalability, huge computing power, and a utility-like availability, ____________________ Keywords: all at a relatively low cost. It has unsurprisingly become a para- Cloud computing, digm shift in ICT, gaining adoptions in all forms of application i.e., SaaS, personal, academic, business, or government. Not only for its PaaS, IaaS, cost-effectiveness but also for its inherent ability to meet busi- MBaaS, ness goals and provide strategic ICT resources. More recently Mobile cloud. there have been advances in cloud computing leading to the evo- lution of newer commercial cloud services, one of which is the Mobile backend as a Service (MBaaS). The MBaaS is important and required for a robust mobile application back-end data storage and management. Its wide adoption and importance stem from its ability to simplify application development and deployment. Also, MBaaS is robust, with the ability to cope with errors by providing nifty tools and other features. These enable rapid scaffolding of mobile applications. This paper reviews Mobile backend as a Service (MBaaS) and provides required background knowledge on some cloud services and their providers to enable stakeholders to make informed decisions and appropriate choic- es. 1. INTRODUCTION spread adoption, utilization, and explosive Cloud computing is utility-like computing usage of mobile devices, various Cloud Ser- proposed in 1961 by John McCarthy but be- vice Providers (CSPs) have ventured into Mo- came a marketing term in 2006 (Buyya et al., bile backend as a Service (MBaaS). This is in a 2013; Erl et al., 2013). Following its wide- bid to provide developers with compelling, reliable, dependable, and economical services IJoCED, 2021, 3 (1); doi.org/10.35806/ijoced.v3i1.139 FM Dahunsi, et al. Commercial Cloud Services for a Robust Mobile… | 32 for mobile application backend data storage iv. possess resources that are rapidly elastic and management. The number of CSPs has depending on user’s demand; increased rapidly with small and large infra- v. be able to automatically measure user’s structure. Therefore, determining the right consumption based on the platform’s vendor out-of-the-box for developers has be- payment strategy while maintaining signif- come a herculean task. icantly higher economical return when Some vendors pride themselves in offer- compared to traditional computing; and ing highly scalable and economical but aver- vi. boast of standard security measures to age storage platforms with minimal setup prevent user’s data from unwarranted and complexities. Whereas others have larger vol- illegal exploitation by the platform provid- umes of data storage while maintaining aver- ers and/or any third party. age performance metrics in terms of scalability, setup complexities, and economic return. However, the focal point(s) of CSPs is that services are designed to meet the basic features of contemporary cloud computing platforms as contained in the definition provided by (Mell and Grance, 2011) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services). The network access can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or Figure 1. Computing in the “cloud”. service provider interaction. Computing in the “cloud” is diagrammatically illustrated in Fig- ure 1. An inference made from the given cloud computing definition reveals that any system that is truly a cloud computing platform should (Almishal and Youssef, 2014; Hung et al., 2012; Mell and Grance, 2011): i. possess services that are available on- demand and can be utilized by users with- out the providers’ interference; Figure 2. Key and distinguishing features of cloud ii. be accessible heterogeneously on a variety computing. of platforms, for example, mobile device, laptop, desktop, or other standardized devices (s); These must-have features are summa- rized and illustrated in Figure 2. Cloud compu- iii. have a dynamic resource allocation capa- ting comes in various models for deployment bility to aid utilization by multiple users; and services to suit individual preferences based on business requirements (Mell and 33 | Indonesian Journal of Computing, Engineering, and Design, Volume 3 Issue 1, April 2021 Page 31-45 Grance, 2011). Figure 3 illustrates the hierar- cussed and solutions provided in Fernando, chical general overview of these models and Loke, and Rahayu (2013). section 1.3 gives a detailed explanation of Papers surveyed did not focus on analyz- them. ing available commercial cloud services for From the foregoing, it is important to mobile applications backend. This paper takes have a clear understanding of CSPs operations a comparatively in-depth analysis of the vari- to decisively select preferred services, hence ous state-of-the-art commercial cloud ser- this paper. vices available for mobile applications backend to present their inherent features and the capabilities offered by the cloud service providers to their customers. The paper further discusses some capabilities of MBaaS offered by CSPs. This is to provide stakeholders with the knowledge required to decisively select preferred services. Figure 3. Cloud Computing models. 1.1. Related Works A succinct review of relevant and related review articles on commercial cloud services for mobile application backend data storage is presented here. A comparative analysis was presented by Daher and Hajjdiab (2018) which was restrict- ed to Amazon simple storage and Microsoft Azure blob storage with a few but in-depth metrics whereas, Khawas and Shah (2018) introduced Google’s Firebase as a case study Figure 4. A detailed taxonomy of the analysis of com- glossing over other available options. Manu- mercial cloud services for mobile application backend jakshi and Ramesh (2018) gave a general data storage. overview of cloud computing storage as a service and in (Hung et al. 2012), a novel frame- 1.2. Taxonomy work which hopes to solve some mobile stor- A detailed taxonomy of the comparative age as a service issue such as cloud providers analysis of commercial cloud services for mo- eavesdropping was presented while discuss- bile application backend data storage based ing the pitfalls of other frameworks. on existing cloud service providers is illustrat- The focus was placed on big data as a ed in Figure 4. This analysis is based on data service in Zheng, Zhu, and Lyu (2013), and Sa- storage services provided by the CSPs, and turi, Saturi, and Reddy (2012) reviewed a simi- issues affecting quality service provisioning. lar area: Data as a Service. A myriad of issues The focus of this paper is on CSPs with the that tend to pose some difficulty in optimizing largest market share for brevity. Section 2 and mobile cloud computing to its full potential 3 discuss the mobile backend storage services such as resource scarcity, frequent disconnec- provided. Analysis of some factors affecting tions, and mobility among others was dis- the quality of their services is presented in section 4. Section 4 also discusses some limi- FM Dahunsi, et al. Commercial Cloud Services for a Robust Mobile… | 34 tations or concerns of using these services. automatically added as soon as the software Section 5 concludes the paper. publisher releases a new version or update. 1.3. Cloud Computing Models However, a prominent downside to this According to (Mell and Grance, 2011), offering and many cloud computing offerings Cloud computing exists in two kinds of models is that user’s data security is not guaranteed. as illustrated in Figure 3. The first being Ser- Also, since the software is remotely provi- vice Models which represent the flavors in sioned, a good internet connection is a re- which cloud computing exists. Deployment quirement for accessibility; thereby posing a Model, the second model, is defined by challenge to users with a poor internet con- where the infrastructure of these services is nection (Hung et al., 2012). Users also have located for accessibility, as some infrastruc- little control over such a software product. ture can rely on customer’s resources while Google’s G Suite, Atlassian’s Jira, Slack others may rely on public infrastructure which Technologies’ Slack, Microsoft 365, Azure IoT can be accessed over the internet. Central and Azure Sentinel, Microsoft’s Power 1.3.1. Service Models Platform, Dynamics 365, Salesforce.com, and

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