Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Mansoor Mohsin

Lu Xun

Michael Marucheck

Richard L Hasha

Gueorgui Chkodrov

Richard Douglas Hill

Vipul A Modi

Rishi Rakesh Sinha

Dave Dopson

Alex Wun

Michael J Marucheck

Embodiments are directed to a cluster of nodes configured to run one or more services. A gateway on each node is configured to provide communication between the node and clients. The gateways manage filters designated by the clients, wherein the filters are named based upon a naming format used to name the services. The gateways receive configuration updates broadcast by a failover manager. The configuration updates comprise service endpoint changes for services running on the nodes. The gateways provide notifications to clients when a filter name matches at least a portion of a service name in a configuration update. The configuration updates identify a configuration version, and the gateways may provide notifications with endpoint information from more than one configuration update version. Notifications may be configured to be sent only when the endpoint for a primary replica of a service has changed.

Scalable event-based notifications

Obtaining tight knowledge about nodes in a federated ring structure. The tight knowledge includes information about neighbors of a given node. The method includes at a given node, sending a join request, requesting to join a federated ring in a distributed computing environment. The method further includes, at the given node, receiving a join reply. The join reply provides an initial view of at least a portion of a neighborhood of the given node. The neighborhood is a set of nodes logically proximate the given node. The method further includes, at the given node, sending a lock request to nodes in the neighborhood to request that the other nodes in the given node's neighborhood are locked so as to not have overlapping nodes joining the given node's neighborhood simultaneously.

Node joining protocol for cluster federation

The present invention extends to methods, systems, and computer program products for distributed aggregation on an overlay network. Embodiments of the invention utilize tiers of nodes that are cascaded in a layered system. Each tier reduces the size of data by orders of magnitude through pre-aggregation. Thus, high volume streams of messages can be reduced to lower volume streams at large scales, such as, for example, the Internet. No central coordination is used; thus there is no central point of failure or bottleneck. When a node fails, other nodes in the same tier as the failing node automatically take over the responsibilities of the failed node.

Distributed aggregation on an overlay network

The present invention extends to methods, systems, and computer program products for synchronizing clocks in an asynchronous distributed system. Embodiments of the invention facilitate creation of a trustable and practical common time (time of day) reference across a set of peer nodes (observers), such as, for example, members within a common asynchronous (distributed) system. A class of pseudo synchronous system can be created via tracking and accumulating worst case relativistic time skews amongst pairs of nodes (observers), without reference to a common master. As such, cooperating nodes can essentially guarantee a lower bound on the time-of-day that one node will observe, given an observation on another node. Accordingly, embodiments of the invention can be applied to provide a consistent (essentially safe) view of the worst case (i.e., greatest variance in) current time across such an asynchronous system&#x2014;without a common external time-of-day clock entity being used.

Synchronizing clocks in an asynchronous distributed system

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Bellevue, WA, United States of America

Mansoor Mohsin