Developing Mobile Applications on Riak

The performance and reliability characteristics of mobile applications are fundamentally different than traditional client applications or Web applications. In a world of different devices running on different wireless networks on a global basis 24 hours per day, the risks of faults at the data layer become greatly magnified. Friction associated with distributing and updating mobile client applications means that today’s mobile application developers may have only one chance to get it right.

Riak addresses the need for high-reliability mobile applications with a shared-nothing architecture that provides a platform for scalable, reliable mobile applications. Downtime due to server failures and data schema updates are non-existent with Riak; adding servers to accommodate spikes in mobile users is straightforward and predictable.

The document-oriented Riak data store makes building out your mobile application simple. As you grow the capabilities of your application, the data store can easily accommodate new data attributes with a flexible schema that is defined in the application layer, not on the server.

Riak’s replication features enable you to maintain hot copies of your application’s data in geographically disparate data centers, to minimize latency and maximize performance for mobile application users based on their locale. Whether the user is in North America, Asia or elsewhere, Riak’s replication architecture provides exceptional data availability over constrained wireless networks.

Riak’s programmability model, based on Web-standard HTTP requests and responses, can accommodate any mobile programmability model. If your mobile application can request and post to Web pages, it can store and retrieve data from Riak.