Active Cloud DB: A RESTful Software-as-a-Service for Language Agnostic Access to Distributed Datastores

In this paper, we present Active Cloud DB, an open source Softwareas-a-Service (SaaS) application that allows for RESTful access to cloud-based distributed datastore technologies that implement the Google Datastore API. We implement Active Cloud DB as a Google App Engine application that we employ to expose the Google App Engine Datastore API to developers – for use with any language and framework. We evaluate this SaaS on both Google App Engine and over AppScale, the open-source implementation of Google App Engine that enables Google App Engine applications to execute on cloud infrastructures without modification. As part of this work, we extend Active Cloud DB with simple caching support to improve the performance of datastore access and evaluate our technique with and without this support. We also make use of this support within multiple client-facing prototypes (e.g. Ruby on Rails, Python through Django) to show the ease-of-use and applicability of our contribution to other web development environments.