Microsoft Internship

At Microsoft, I worked on a product called the Azure Stack. This is a product that makes Azure's cloud services available in other environments including remote locations that are not always connected to the Internet (such as cruise ships) and also datacenters and edge locations for a more personalized cloud. Read more here.

I worked on the Azure Stack Bridge team which handles the communication between the Azure services and the Azure Stack services. The services in the Azure Stack are a subset of those available in Azure and need to be updated as well when Azure updates roll out. This however only happens when the Azure Stack is connected to the Internet or another source that acts as a repository (special USB drives).

The Azure Bridge communicates between the Azure Marketplace, the Azure Stack Admin Portal (dashboard), and the Admin Stack Resource Providers (RPs) where the actual downloaded products from Azure Marketplace are stored. The specific problem I worked on during the internship was tracking the progress of any downloads from Azure Marketplace and having a means to interrupt them. This was a client-requested feature for a long time.

Earlier, the Azure Bridge would delegate the downloads to the Azure Stack RPs who would directly download the products from the Azure Storage. However, because of the delegation, Azure Bridge was unaware of the progress of the downloads and could not display progress in the Admin Portal. Similarly, it could not accept requests from the Admin Portal for the cancellation of any downloads as the Azure Stack RPs had no interface to accept them.

However, modifying this to allow progress tracking was not as simple as the Azure Bridge taking over the roles of the Azure Stack RP. This is because of the large number of different RPs. Instead, the Azure Bridge acts as an intermediary; it downloads from Azure Storage to a local Storage account on the Azure Stack before notifying the Azure Stack RPs to continue the download from the local Storage account (which is much faster as it is a local transfer). From the RP point of view, nothing has changed, but because of the local download in Azure Bridge, progress can now be tracked and/or interrupted through the Admin Portal.

I implemented this using the .NET Framework and C#. Similarly, I exposed an interface for allowing cancellation and pause/resume functionality for the downloads in the future.

This was the first time I worked on a large scale product. A lot of time was spent learning the job system used in several Microsoft products and understanding the deceptively simple looking problem. I also had to consider dependencies on other products and entities as well. I interacted with the Admin Portal team to ensure my payload changes did not break their UI and similarly with one of the Azure Stack RP teams to ensure my assumptions were correct. A major takeaway was debugging skills (especially remote debugging). I spent quite a few days stuck on debugging problems that sometimes were in locations that I assumed would work (such as other libraries). I learned remote debugging tools and also got a deeper understanding of what to look for while debugging.