Gluon Cloud Overview

Gluon Cloud is the bridge between your application running on devices (desktop, laptop, mobile or embedded) and optional enterprise systems at your backend.

overview

Gluon Cloud has 2 main functions:

  • provide a remote persistent data store for client devices. This store is dynamic as well: when data changes on one client, Gluon Cloud is capable of propagating the change to other clients.

  • allow existing enterprise and cloud systems to interact with your data

1. Remote persistent data store

Applications often use data that needs to be stored. Some data is only relevant to a specific instance of the application (i.e. local settings) , other data is relevant to all instances of the application (i.e. chat data) and some data is relevant to some instances (i.e. user preferences for a user who has a number of devices).

Charm Connect is the component that manages data on the client. Charm Connect provides an API that allows users to store and to synchronize data. When using Charm Connect, developers can for each data entity choose between a number of options:

  • should the data be stored on the device only?

  • should the data be stored in Gluon Cloud?

  • should local changes to the data propagate to Gluon Cloud?

  • in case the data in Gluon Cloud changes, does the local device copy needs to be synchronized immediately?

Charm Connect communicates via an efficient protocol with Gluon Cloud to achieve the different goals. Gluon Cloud provides a scalable and persistent data store that is used to store data and to update clients when data changes.

The technical details on Charm Connect are described in the Charm documentation.

2. Integration with Enterprise and Cloud Systems

While Gluon Cloud stores data in its own Data Store, it does not replace existing backend applications and cloud systems. Gluon Cloud rather orchestrates the flow of data between different devices running a particular application. Gluon Cloud provides a bi-directional integration with other systems. Gluon Cloud can be configured in a way that when data changes in the Gluon Cloud data store (because a client changed it), a call is made towards a third party endpoint, providing information on the changed data. Vice versa, third party components (e.g. enterprise and cloud systems) can modify data in the Gluon Cloud store, which can depending on the configuration automatically and immediately be transmitted to the clients.

3. Security

While Gluon Cloud stores all required data from all applications in its storage service, the applications are isolated from each other. Data from one application can never leak to another application. Also, all operations require the correct credentials, and transactions must be signed with a specific key and secret.

For additional security, Gluon provides the Gluon Cloud software as a stand-alone service called Gluon Cloud on-Premise. With Gluon Cloud on-Premise, system administrators can install a local version of Gluon Cloud into their own VPN, ensuring an even stronger isolation.

4. Samples

Have a look at the samples (e.g. Comments 2.0 uses Gluon Cloud) in our samples repository.

A step-by-step guide on how to setup and configure your Gluon Cloud application can be found here.