Local-First Enterprise Applications

Local-First Software has been proposed in 2019 by Kleppmann et al. [11] to address concerns with the growing number of cloud-only web-applications, as these move control from the end users to the cloud providers. Local-First Software stores all necessary data locally, and has the cloud only as an optional utility, to support cross-device synchronization and collaboration with other users.

Enterprise Applications are traditionally implemented with a client-server architecture, and are nowadays also following the trend of cloud-only web-applications. The move to the cloud raises similar concerns about vendor lock-in, resilience and business continuity, data protection, and privacy.

In this master thesis, we investigate if the ideals of Local-First Software can be applied to Enterprise Applications. We look at three business processes to understand the business requirements for Enterprise Applications. We then discuss how these match with the ideals of Local-First Software, and propose 12 requirements for Local-First Enterprise Applications. We will see that these still require centralized systems, albeit with a weaker dependency than traditional Enterprise Applications.

We develop a prototype to further analyze and discuss if and how Enterprise Applications can be developed based on the ideals of Local-First Software. For this, we develop two underlying libraries as a foundation for connection management and CRDT state replication over a hierarchical peer-to-peer network.