< Part 1 (Intro)

Contents:

1. A little more Live Mesh (CTP)
2. The Actors
3. The Modern Approach

1. A little more Live Mesh (CTP)

Today, online and offline tend to be two different approaches for building software. Most software companies offer either online or offline versions of their software.

If they somehow offer both then mostly sure one is a limited (reduced functionality) version of the other. Moreover companies tend to create a gap between the time when the offline and the online version gets updated. You always hear thing like “the online version does not yet support feature X that is available in the desktop version. Will be available soon”. The bad thing is the soon might mean a couple of months.

Creating software that works the same way both online and offline is not a new idea but until not it would require a lot of overhead. There was the need to simulate either the offline environment online or the reverse.

Now, with Live Mesh, the online environment is simulated on the local machine with no overhead for the developer. The guys from Microsoft resolved this problem and they’ve simplified our lives.

There are some aspects that need to be clarified as pointed in Part 1 about online services and applications:

• The user experience: this problems was somehow resolved by enabling applications to be based on Silverlight. This technology enables web applications to deliver an improved experience compared to the classical web apps. It is client-side technology.
• The need of permanent connectivity: just like smart clients, Mesh Enabled Applications can run with no network connectivity, persist offline what needs to be processed online and continue the process when connectivity is available. In other words what can be done offline is done anytime and if Internet access is required the task is queued.

2. The Actors

Lets consider a company named InvoiceGuys which offers a service called InvoiceService that exposes functionality for processing invoices. Anyone can subscribe the this service – for the sake of simplicity we’ll just ignore authorization and authentication; just don’t do this in real life!

DeliveryGuys is a another company that delivers packages of any kind. They have all they need except an invoice processor. Also they have a lot of delivery boys that have laptops but the Internet connection is not the best possible – sometimes is just doesn’t work. Moreover DeliveryGuys’ employees are not technical and they know to use only a limited set of applications.

DelivertyGuys have the following requirements:

1. the invoice processing must be automated
2. because of the their non technical employees they want a unified experience for all their software
3. there will be software that runs on the delivery laptops but also on the company’s sales desktops that are always connected to the Internet.
4. each workstation (mobile or not) must run the latest version of the delivery software and the update process must be transparent to the user
5. all data must be synchronized between company’s workstations
6. managers must be able to access the application from any PC regardless of their local rights

3. The Modern Approach

Each of the previous requirements is analyzed:

1. “the invoice processing must be automated”

This is the easiest part. As mentioned above, InvoiceGuys offer the InvoiceService service so all we need to do is consume their it and, of course, pay whatever they require for using it. So our application will rely on a 3^rd party service that might be offline sometime – remember this!

2. “because of the their non technical employees they want a unified experience for all their software”

3. “there will be software that runs on the delivery laptops but also on the company’s sales desktops that are always connected to the Internet”

and

6. “the managers must be able to access the application from any PC regardless of their local rights”

Mesh CTP allows applications to work both online and offline. Moreover the same experience is offered both online and offline. Even from a public computer you can sign in and use the application.

4. “each workstation (mobile or not) must run the latest version of the delivery software and the update process must be transparent”

When connecting to the Internet, Mesh CTP synchronizes your local application with the latest available offline with no user interaction. While using the online version from a web browser you always have the latest version so there is no need to worry.

5. all data must be synchronized between company’s workstations

This is what Mesh actually does – it synchronizes data across machines. This will not be a problem.

In conclusion, Mesh CTP is a good choice for the client application.

A possible representation of the scenario using a use case diagram is provided left.

If Internet connection is available the user can use the local application of its web version. Both look and work the same and if the application is locally installed the choice is just a matter of preference. Also the application will use the online data and will synchronize immediately.

If no Internet connection is available then the application will connect to the local Mesh that has a cached version of the online data, will work as much as possible with it and will synchronize with the live environment when possible.

Basically the local data is just an extension of the live data.

The modern approach is that we can have applications that rely on services which might not be available all the time and also can run both offline and online – the application itself can be a software offered as a service.

Part 3 will present the actual implementation of the client application and a skeleton for the service.

Special thanks to Timotei Dolean and Andrei Ignat for reviewing this post.

The protection model based on a thin-client agent and server architecture which services malware protection as opposed to locally installed products. By combining local detection technologies with cloud-scanning capabilities and applying non-intrusive interception techniques on the client architecture, Panda Cloud Antivirus provides some of the best protection with a lightweight antivirus thin-client agent that barely consumes any PC resources.

Of course this S+S approach has advantages and drawbacks.

Advantages:

• Always using the latest version of software and protection
• Minimum impact on local resources
• Detection of threats in less than 6 minutes (this is what Panda announced on the official blog)

Drawbacks:

• Need of permanent Internet connection
• Without Internet connection the protection is reduced

Panda Cloud Antivirus takes advantage of the cloud world and combines the information from all users in order to detect and stop malware. Using the so called Panda Collective Intelligence, a cloud-based test lab for malicious software, samples are collected, analyzed, categorized and, if needed, disinfection routines are created. Therefore the community becomes the lab. In this way there is no need for software updates, there is no virus definition database on the client computer and everyone has access to the latest protection.

Compared to other antivirus solutions, Panda categorizes local files from “real security risk” to “minimum security risk” and by this criteria the scanning engine prioritizes it’s tasks. There are three types of automatic scanning (as mentioned on the official blog):

• On-Access Scan. This is the maximum priority resident scan that is applied only to objects which are truly a security risk in a specific point in time: files which are being executed or used. The file is intercepted, prevented from running and disinfected if found to be malicious.
• Prefetch Scan. There are other elements such as files downloaded from the Internet which, while not being executed at a specific point in time, have a much higher risk and probability of being executed at any time. These files should be watched more closely than files which have barely any activity, as we can expect them to be executed, unpacked, copied or moved shortly. A Prefetch Scan basically launches an asynchronous local & cloud query on the file to scan it “as soon as possible” without impacting performance. Of course if any of these files is called to be executed, the file will be intercepted and an on-access scan will be applied to it.
• Background Scan. Lastly a normal PC has hundreds of thousands of files in its hard drive. Most of these files are not executing normally and simply just “sit there” until either the use double-clicks on them or they are called upon by another process. These are considered the least dangerous files from a security perspective. Panda Cloud Antivirus will continuously run Background Scans on these in an asynchronous manner while the PC is idle, without impacting performance at all. Of course if any of these files is called to be executed, the file will be intercepted and an on-access scan will be applied to it.

In my opinion this approach is completely logic and makes sense to scan executing files first because they are the big candidates for infecting the system.

Because it would be impossible to send the entire file in the cloud for analysis, for each file multiple cryptographic hashes are created; among them is a “reverse signature” of the file. This reverse signature is able to identify multiple similar files. The response from the cloud can be “malware”, “goodware” or “unknown”. There are sent also some “behavioral traits” of files to be scanned heuristically remotely by the cloud. These are basically properties and characteristics of each file. In summary, no content and no personal information is ever sent to the cloud.

The following video describes how the Cloud Antivirus works:

The system I used for testing is a Windows Xp Professional with Service Pack 3 that was running in a virtual machine with 512 MB of RAM and single core processor. The results mostly sure were affected by my laptop’s hdd with only 5400 rpm and by the fact that I was running in a VM. However the overall impression was good.

The interface is absolute minimalistic. Window appearance is quite fancy with some flip effects if you click the lower right corner – I think it is inspired by Mac applications. The user has access to some basic settings, scanning options and reports:

I was impressed by the fact that it actually found some threats. Also he detected instantly the “Sub7″ application and deleted all its files.  The only problem is that the computer scanning process (full scan) is extremely slow. It took almost an hour to scan all the files on drive C.

But considering that the resource usage is more that reasonable (see the next image – the CPU graph) I think the previous aspect might be overlooked.

If the previous thoughts were not enough to make you try it then the fact that it is FREE might change your mind. Panda announced that this product will remain free even when going out of the Beta program.

I think this type of solutions are the future but there is still a gap that must be filled in: the permanent Internet connection. However if the connection is available Panda Cloud Antivirus is a viable solution especially for machine with low resources like netbooks or even PDA’s. There are still many problems with Panda Cloud Antivirus that can be seen and discussed on the official blog and there is no 64 bit support but the overall trend is good and I think it might be a future protection solution.

My personal rating would be 8/10 but because it is Beta I’ll give it a 9/10.

You can download the cloud antivirus from the official website.

Part 2 (The Idea) >

Contents:

1. What is Software + Services
2. Azure Services Platform
3. Live Mesh

1. What is Software + Services

Over the past decade, the world we live in has been transformed by the Web. More and more people gain Internet access, services become more accessible  and the experience is improving. There are a lot of advantages of using Internet services:

• Low hardware requirements: services use the resources provided by the vendor and not the local ones. We only need devices capable of displaying the information that the service is sending. Most of the time no processing is done locally.
• Device independence: a service can be accessed from any device connected the Internet. It does not require special privileges on the local machine and no installation is required.
• No maintenance: services are maintained and updated by the service provider, the client must do nothing to configure it. The service is an out of the box solution.
• Flexibility: we can change the service provider whenever we want. This capability creates new opportunities for businesses that can dynamically swap services and choose the one that matches their needs.

However there are still some limitations for which running local software is preferred instead of a web application/service:

• User experience: browsers are not yet capable of delivering the same user experience as a local running application.
• Privacy: there are situations when a company chooses the keep all its data within its controlled/trusted borders. There are many privacy concerns when using 3^rd party services because there is no control over the security and must rely on the provider’s security. Some complex federation problems might occur.
• Offline experience: even though the Internet is now available most of the time there are still situation when network access is not available (maybe some technical problems) and the service  cannot be accessed.

What do we do when we want to power of local running applications and the flexibility and ease-of-use of the Internet services? Simple: we take the best part of each, create an architecture that combines them and use it for application that work both online and offline. Ray Ozzie (Microsoft Chief Software Architect) mentioned that “when you combine the ever-growing power of devices and the increasing ubiquity of the Web, you come up with a sum that is greater than its parts. … Software-plus-Services is the next logical step in the evolution of computing.  It represents an industry shift toward a design approach that is neither exclusively software-centric nor browser-centric” ^[1].

Software plus Services describes the idea of combining hosted services with capabilities that are best achieved with locally running software. It describes composite applications created by combining traditional software with remote services to provide consistent and seamlessly integrated user experience across devices and form factors. Software plus Services is a concept that Software as a Service (SaaS) complements the traditional packaged software running on both client or server by services adding value^[2].

To get a better image of what Software + Services mean that a look at the video below created by CommonCraft. The video presents a generic situation about two people, one using services and the other an on premise solution, each needing a part of what the other has. The result is a combination of Software + Services:

2. Azure Services Platform

Azure Services Platform is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform that provides a wide range of internet services that can be consumed from both on-premises environments or the Internet.

It allows the development of scalable services that can be hosted in Microsoft’s data centers. The Azure Services Platform is a service, per se, that allows clients to buy and use compute and storage resources in order to provide other services. In other words is a service for services.

Services created on the Azure platform can be exposed through web interfaces and web services. If the functionality is exposed through a web service then it can be consumed by any client and can be easily integrated in some enterprise solutions. Hosting services in the cloud has many advantages like the elasticity of resources and costs, no worries about maintenance and insurance that no data is lost because of hardware problems.

The cloud platforms have some limitations but if they can be overcome this approach of building and hosting services can be a real benefit  for businesses both in terms of expenses and availability.

For more information about the Azure Service Platform see my other posts about it:

• Microsoft Patent no. 20080319910
• Windows Azure Application Architecture
• GeekMeet Brasov #1 – Cloud Computing

3. Live Mesh

Live Mesh is a data synchronization service from Microsoft. It allows users to sync files and folders across devices and the Live Desktop. The information about devices and folders participating in a synchronization relationship is not stored locally but at the service-end. Live Mesh is an application that runs on the Azure platform and is a good example of Software plus Services.

There is the “live” part that runs in the cloud and offers a Live Desktop that displays the files/folders synchronized and the devices that take part in the synchronization. The client application is installed locally (on Windows, Windows Mobile or MacOS) and takes care of the local files, determines when files and/or devices changed and require a new sync.

At the time of writing there are two versions of Mesh (Mesh.com and Mesh-CTP.com) that will eventually be merged. Mesh.com is the version of Mesh that is available to everyone and allows sync of files across devices.

Apparently no difference between Mesh and MeshCTP (note the Apps button in the right image)

Mesh-CTP is the version for developers that is available only by invitation (you can apply for the CTP program in order to get one). The main difference between the two versions if that the CTP allows the development of applications for the Live Desktop.

As I told before Mesh allows files and folders to be synchronized across devices and Live Desktop. Mesh-CTP brings in a new concept: application synchronization. The applications created for Mesh will be synchronized across devices and will work offline (!) by connecting to a local version of Mesh. Once online the files that have changed on the local device or any other will sync again. To be more precise, when not connected to the Internet the application provides only the functionality that not requires Internet access.

The idea above is not new (see Outlook, IE, FeedDaemon etc. that have an offline mode) but the revolutionary thing is that the same (!) application can work both online and offline and can be deployed on the local computer or on the Live Desktop. Also the latest version of the application is always installed because once a new version is available it is synchronized with all devices.

The next two parts of this article will present a modern approach for constructing software (that works both online and offline) and services using the Live Mesh (CTP) and respectively Azure Services Platform.

Part 2 (The Idea) >

References:

^[1] http://www.microsoft.com/softwareplusservices/software-plus-services-full-story.aspx

^[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_plus_services

Special thanks to Timotei Dolean, Ursul and Andrei Ignat for reviewing this post.