Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Luis Irun-Briz

James Ernest Johnson

Paul England

Marcus Peinado

Saad Syed

Ajay Mani

Pavel Anatolievich Dournov

Sushant Pramod Rewaskar

Guhan Suriyanarayanan

Ashish B Shah

Todd F Pfleiger

Jork Loeser

Akram Hassan

Pavithra Tyamagondlu Nagesharao

Gaurav Gupta

Jiahe Helen Wang

Jose Bernabeu-Auban

Weidong Cui

Frank V Peschel-Gallee

Corey M Sanders

Haizhi Xu

Stephen E Dossick

Mark L Niehaus

Ivan Santa Maria Filho

Nikola J Livic

Laurent Visconti

Maxim Khutomenko

Umer Azad

Karl Chen

Stephan J Zachweija

Todd Pfleiger

Ashish Shah

Embodiments are directed to a distributed computing system comprising a plurality of compute nodes for providing resources to users and a hierarchy of two or more layers of controllers coupling the compute nodes to a user interface via a control plane, wherein at least one compute node receives a local application program interface (API) call from an application running on the at least one compute node, the local API call causing the at least one compute node to configure a local resource without requiring commands from the control plane.

Data plane API in a distributed computing network

Embodiments are directed to a distributed computing system comprising a plurality of compute nodes for providing resources to users and a hierarchy of two or more layers of controllers coupling the compute nodes to a user interface via a control plane, wherein at least one compute node receives a local application program interface (API) call from an application running on the at least compute node, the local API call causing the at least one compute node to configure a local resource without requiring commands from the control plane.

Tenant and server platform coordination of the performance of atomic tasks that are to be performed by the platform, but which have at least a potential impact on the tenant. The server platform allows a particular tenant a timeframe within which the tenant itself may approve of initiation of each of one or more tasks. The server platform may protect itself from delayed action by imposing time constraints on the timeframe such that after the timeframe is elapsed, the tenant no longer has control over triggering the initiation of the particular task. Accordingly, the tenant is provided with flexibility on controlling initiation of a task performed by the server platform, while the server platform maintains a level of control to protect its resources and balances the needs of the various tenants.

Tenant control in initiating atomic platform tasks

A distributed application may be updated by using information provided by the application to determine grouping, sequencing, and whether or not to advance an update sequence. The application may provide input to an update sequence, and may cause the update sequence to repair one or more replicas prior to updating. The update mechanism may be used to change the distributed application topology as well as make changes to the application executable code, application configuration, quest operating system, virtual machine, and host systems, among others. In some cases, the distributed application may use a quorum to determine which version is current, and the quorum may change during the update process.

Coordinated upgrades in distributed systems

Methods, systems, and computer storage media for updating instances of a service application within nodes of a data center are provided. The system includes a state machine equipped for designating an earlier version of software running on some instances as a basement version and a newer version of software running on other instances as a latest version. The system also includes a compatibility mechanism responsible for allowing the basement version, the latest version, and other versions of the service application therebetween to interact using a data structure associated within the earlier version, or lowest common version of the service application. The compatibility mechanism is located apart from core logic of the service application. The activities of the state machine and the compatibility mechanism allow the instances to communicate with each other (using the lowest common version) while exposing just the validated version(s) of the service application to the client.

Mechanism for safe and reversible rolling upgrades

Systems and methods for automatically reverse engineering an input data format using dynamic data flow analysis. Combining input data with a simulated execution of the binary program using the input data and analyzing the use of the data by the program to generate a BNL-like grammar representing the input data format. The input data can be application level protocols, network protocols or formatted files.

Automatic reverse engineering of input formats

Methods, systems, and computer-readable media for facilitating coordination between a fabric controller of a cloud-computing network and a service application running in the cloud-computing network are provided. Initially, an update domain (UD) that includes role instance(s) of the service application is selected, where the service application represents a stateful application is targeted for receiving a tenant job executed thereon. The process of coordination involves preparing the UD for execution of the tenant job, disabling the role instance(s) of the UD to an offline condition, allowing the tenant job to execute, and restoring the role instance(s) to an online condition upon completing execution of the tenant job. Preparing the UD includes notifying a management role established within the service application of the fabric controller's intent to execute the tenant job and receiving a management-role response communicating a presence of replications of internal state(s) of the role instance(s) affected by the tenant job.

Increasing availability of stateful applications

A single application can be executed across multiple execution environments in an efficient manner if at least a relevant portion of the virtual memory assigned to the application was equally accessible by each of the multiple execution environments. A request by a process in one execution environment can, thereby, be directed to an operating system, or other core software, in another execution environment and can be made by a shadow of the requesting process in the same manner as the original request was made by the requesting process itself. Because of the memory invariance between the execution environments, the results of the request will be equally accessible to the original requesting process even though the underlying software that responded to the request may be executing in a different execution environment. A similar thread invariance can be maintained to provide for accurate translation of requests between execution environments.

Coupled symbiotic operating system

Malware may be identified based on attempts to use tainted data in certain ways, such as by attempting to execute the tainted data, by attempting to modify execution control based on tainted data, or by attempting to apply an existing function to the tainted data. A data's taint is determined based on the location from which the data originates. When data from a tainted source is moved to an otherwise non-tainted destination, the taint may be propagated from the source to the destination, to indicate that the destination is now of unknown safety. A component may be used to observe the operation of a process, in order to determine what data is being moved with respect to the process, and how that data is being used.

Malware detection with taint tracking

Software typically changes over its useful lifetime. New versions of software are created to change or improve functionality, to add functionality, to correct coding errors, improve performance, to adapt to new hardware and for many other well-known reasons. The process of delivering new versions of software to users is called servicing the software. The operating system decides which version(s) of a piece of software satisfy dependencies of other software by creation of a context. The context may be used to organize and manage versions of software, to declare activation policies concerning the use of different versions of software and to service the versioned software. The context may include an activation service that maintains and manages resolution polices, resolves dependencies, constructs the environment in which an application runs and initiates the running of the software.

Servicing software through versioning

Coupled symbiotic operating systems

Growing community of inventors

Bellevue, WA, United States of America

Luis Irun-Briz