March 6th, 2008
Windows Live Platform Services: A guide for the perplexed
Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie outlined during his Mix ‘08 keynote this week a very high-level vision about how Microsoft is moving to be more of a utility-computing/cloud-computing vendor.
Ozzie didn’t talk specifics about any of the plumbing that makes it possible. But David Treadwell, Corporate Vice president of Live Platform Services, with whom I had a chance to meet at the conference this week, shed some light on what Microsoft is building to enable all the fancy “entertainment mesh” and “connected productivity” scenarios that Microsoft is promising to provide in the coming years.
The Windows Live Platforms Services layer is one of four sets of services that Microsoft is building to power its datacenter services. Treadwell used an operating-system analogy to describe Microsoft’s evolving Live Platform Services platform.
“We want to make it as easy to build services as building a client app,” Treadwell said. “We know we need file systems, security, storage, scaling” — all the things you need in a PC operating system.
This is what the Live Services platform looks like (when compared to an operating system), according to Treadwell:
PC — Live Services
Hardware — Datacenter servers
Kernel – Computation, storage (Windows Live Storage), management and networking services
Communication services — Identity, directory, permissions, higher-level storage services (including the just-announced SQL Server Data Services)
Win32 layer — Live APIs (messaging, storage, photo and others)
User services — Windows Live services — everything from Windows Live Messaging, to Windows Live SkyDrive
“It took Microsoft 10 years to pull together what became Windows 95,” Treadwell said. So it’s not so surprising that it could take the company at least that long to unify the services that underlie its individual Live services (like Windows Live Hotmail, Office Live Workspace and more.) Until then, Microsoft will continue to run its individual Live services on the infrastructure that has been customized to run each of these services.
Ozzie used multiple times during his keynote this week the word “mesh” in describing what Microsoft has coming on the consumer front.
“Mesh just means lots of different devices used in a cohesive way that leverage Web services when they make sense,” Treadwell said.
Microsoft’s two synchonization services — FeedSync and the Synchronization Framework are key to what the company will deliver on the mesh front, Treadwell said.
I ran a few codenames past Treadwell to try to piece together other elements of the Live Services Platform puzzle:
Cosmos: Treadwell acknowledged that this is the storage layer underlying search
Windows Live Core: Treadwell wouldn’t comment on anything having to do with Windows Live Core — despite the fact that his bio says: “Treadwell most recently helped to start the company’s Windows Live Core effort, an incubation project that’s now a key component of the company’s services platform that will allow the creation of compelling applications by making deep use of network-based information.”
Horizon: Big no comment on this one. The LiveSide guys have been all over this one. Horizon is Microsoft’s forthcoming platform for unified data management; synchronization of files and folders and more, the LiveSiders say. It sounds like Horizon is one component of Windows Live Core, to me.
CloudDB/Blue: Another no comment from Treadwell on the SQL Server in the cloud implementations on which Microsoft’s been working.
Treadwell and other Microsoft officials this week promised that Microsoft would fill in a lot of the blanks around its Live services strategy by October, when the company will hold its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.
What pieces do you see missing from Microsoft’s utility/cloud-computing strategy that the company needs to address?
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