The amount of multimedia content on the Internet has been growing at a remarkable rate, and users are increasingly looking to share online media with colleagues and friends on social networks. Several commercial and academic solutions have attempted to make it easier to share this large variety of online content with others, but they are generally limited to only sending Web links. At the same time, existing products have not been able to provide a scalable system that synchronizes disparate Web content sources among many users in real-time. Such a goal is especially desired in order to provide the benefits of cloud deployments to collaborative applications. Many Web-based applications cannot predict the number of connections that they may need to handle. As such, applications must either provision a higher number of servers in anticipation of more traffic, or be faced with a degradation of the user experience when a large number of clients connect to the application. Cloud-based deployments can alleviate these issues by allowing the application’s server base to auto scale based on the user demand. A cloud deployment can also employ servers in different geographic locations in order to offer better latency and response times to its clients. Moving a collaborative application from using a single server to a cloud and then to a distributed cloud is not a trivial matter, however. This chapter will show our experience with how such a transition can be performed, and will present the architectural changes that had to be implemented at the server and cloud level in order to create a distributed execution that resides in the cloud.
Designing an intelligent home media center
