Supporting Apps in the Personal Cloud: Using WebSockets within Hybrid Apps

Cloud Computing [1,2] is a "utility computing model" (John McCarthy, 1961), that allows the purchase of virtualized hardware (Infrastructure as a Service, IaaS), software platforms (Platform as a Service, PaaS) or applications/functionality (Software as a Service, SaaS) in a pay-as-you-go manner, comparable to the metered purchase of electricity, gas or water. Seen in the past primarily as a means for organizations to increase their flexibility, cloud computing has begun to enter the consumer space by offering solutions to personal computing needs that are based on virtualization e.g. cloud storage. Accessing such cloud services with tablets and smartphones enables user and context aware cloud services resulting in a personal(ized) cloud. This personal cloud allows users to access data and services via their mobile devices which in turn allows time, location and device independent computing. This paper focusses on the infrastructure challenges of enabling the personal cloud and presents an evaluation of our consumer-centric cloud portal (C3P).