Behind Live Mesh: How we run cloud services

re: Behind Live Mesh: How we run cloud services

Marc Vallribera i Ros — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:03:45 GMT

I think that this is a great service! I've always dreamed of a time where my information is simply "there", not "in my desktop", "in my laptop",... But my dream goes a bit futher having the ability to not only synchronise the same file across all the devices but to choose how it will be synchronised. And I don't mean automatic or manual sync. I mean this: you have 2GB of pictures in your desktop and want to have all of them "everywhere". But your mobile phone doesn't have that much capacity. Wouldn't it be great if you could choose to resize pictures to fit in the device?

Maybe this can be done as an extension or third-party application inside the Live Mesh service?

In the past I made a lot of flowcharts and notes about this... maybe you are interested?

Anyway, you are doing a great work! Keep on it! I hope I'll soon be invited to try it!

re: Behind Live Mesh: How we run cloud services

Alex Mallet — Sat, 10 May 2008 00:07:07 GMT

myforesight: You've described an interesting service, but it's not really the focus of Live Mesh -- the features you list belong in a utility computing service, whereas Live Mesh is a synchronization platform.

And of course we can't comment on anything other than what our team is building :-)

re: Behind Live Mesh: How we run cloud services

Alan Isherwood — Thu, 08 May 2008 10:37:44 GMT

So, who do I have to bribe in order to jump the beta queue on getting a Live Mesh account?

re: Behind Live Mesh: How we run cloud services

myforesight — Thu, 08 May 2008 00:28:58 GMT

When are we going to see a Cloud Service from Microsoft, comparable to Amazon EC2 or Google AppEngine?

As an suggestion, the system would have the following features, easy available for non-professionals:

- No technical Administration due to tight standards and limited ports

- Automatically scaling on demand

- DNS services for external Domain Names (Domain Pointers

- LiveMail for Domains integration

to folders, instead httpd.conf settings)

- Ability to run PHP (or Zend PHP) incl. 100% mod_rewrite compatibility and MySQL additional to M$ standards

- Billing based on storage/m., CPUhours/m.,traffic/m

- Interface comparable to Parallels Plesk.. why reinvent the wheel?

re: Behind Live Mesh: How we run cloud services

Jason — Thu, 08 May 2008 00:27:39 GMT

It looks like a wonderful service. I hope that I will be invited to test it out sooner, rather then later.

Designed for failure

Angus Logan's Blog — Sat, 03 May 2008 19:22:42 GMT

Alex Mallet posted @ the Live Mesh blog about how the Live Mesh cloud services run, how we think about

Live Mesh – learn more

//steve clayton: geek in disguise — Thu, 01 May 2008 16:22:48 GMT

digg_url = 'http://blogs.msdn.com/stevecla01/archive/2008/05/01/live-mesh-learn-more.aspx'; In my hast

re: Behind Live Mesh: How we run cloud services

John — Thu, 01 May 2008 05:29:20 GMT

Probably for the same reason the rest of the web uses REST, not SOAP.

re: Behind Live Mesh: How we run cloud services

Alex Mallet — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 22:30:37 GMT

Thanks for the questions.

I’ll answer the second question first: we didn’t build everything from scratch. As I mentioned already, we reused a huge chunk of work in the form of the Autopilot system. We’ve also reused existing code libraries from Windows Live teams like Messenger and Search. In general, we tried really hard to write as little new code as possible.

As far as the use of SOAP goes, there are really two answers. For the HTTP-based communication on the backend, we’re simply reusing the existing REST-based interfaces that are already exposed by the services – building a SOAP layer would have been extra work. TCP is used between services that don’t already have an HTTP interface, are relatively tightly-coupled, and have communication flows that are more suited to the stream-based semantics provided by TCP than the SOAP request-response model.

re: Behind Live Mesh: How we run cloud services

Nektar — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:47:58 GMT

Why don't you use any Soap web services to communicate on the back-end? Why did you have to build everything from scratch?