Figure 1: Performance improvement made possible by Odin\u2019s knowledge of Internet latencies to Microsoft\u2019s regional datacenters.<\/p><\/div>\n

Here\u2019s how we do this: Odin issues active measurements from popular Microsoft applications to get high coverage of the Internet paths from Microsoft\u2019s users to endpoints that can be either inside Microsoft or elsewhere. Measurements are tailored on a per-use-case basis (for example, application requirements). By targeting measurements to external third-party destinations, we can infer unreachability events to Microsoft endpoints due to network failures.<\/p>\n

I chose to highlight the Odin paper because this is an \u201cexperience paper\u201d that I think will interest many of you. I encourage you to read it because it describes a production system that Microsoft uses. It is a remarkably detailed study of a large, complex Internet measurement platform that is integrated into a few important Microsoft applications, gathering billions of measurements per day. It has been running for over two years, improving operations and detecting and diagnosing reachability issues. It serves as the foundation for several Azure and CDN applications including traffic management, availability alerting, network diagnostics and A\/B testing.<\/p>\n

Microsoft\u2019s Data Center Tour<\/strong><\/p>\n

Recently I was talking to a seasoned networking researcher who works on cloud computing and builds technology for data centers. He also teaches courses on data center infrastructure and operations. To my great surprise he told me that he had never seen a mega-scale data center.<\/p>\n