Indigo: Building Peer to Peer Applications

Todd R. Manion tells us all about how Indigo will help us design our P2P applications.

P2P Landscape

• Collaboration
  • Project workspaces solving a goal
  • Sharing your files with other people
• Content Distribution
  • Concert, company meeting, class
  • Distribution of product updates
• Real-Time Communications
  • Instant messaging voice, video
  • Real-time game play/collaboration
• Distributed Processing
  • Dissection and distribution of task
• Improved Internet Technologies

Why something new?

• Limited Supply of Public Addresses
• NATs prevent sharing from the edge
• Limited Name Resolution system
  • Does not handle dynamic addresses
  • Does not work in ad-hoc environments
  • Does not lend itself to consumer use
• Inefficient Multipoint Communication
• Everyone rewrites the infrastructure

Infrastructure Design Goals

• Secure, robust in face of failure/attack
• Scalable, from ad-hoc to the Internet
• Server-less, no central point of failure
• Self-tuning, adapts to constant change
• Self-repairing, automatically fixes itself

P2P Technologies

• Peer Name Resolution Protocol (PNRP)
  • Scalable, secure, serverless name resolution
• "Indigo" PeerChannel
  • Efficient distribution of information between nodes
  • Auto-tuning, self-repairing communication layer
• Peer Groups
  • Create and manage persistent securable groups
• Peer Store (built using WinFS)
  • Distributed data management
  • Synchronized, replicated meta-data store

Name Registration/Resolution

• Members of System.Net.PeerToPeer
• Major Classes
  • PeerName
  • PeerIdentity
  • PnrpEndPoint
  • PnrpEndPointRegistration
  • PnrpEndPointResolver
  • Cloud/CloudWatcher
• Available in Longhorn PDC Preview

Indigo PeerChannel

• MajorClasses
  • PeerChannel
  • PeerManager
  • Node
  • Message
  • Port
• Available in future Longhorn release (boo!)

PeerStore And PeerGroup

• Major Classes
• PeerIdentity
• PeerGroup
• Member
• PeerStore
• Record
• GroupInfo