Skype completely moves to the cloud

Customer support for older operating systems ends from November 2016.

From the very beginning of its existence, Skype worked on the principle of P2P, that is, it established connections directly between users. The Skype architecture provided for the presence of “super sites” (supernods), which were users with fairly powerful computers and communication channels. Through them, the traffic of other participants of the P2P network was passed (the ability to disable the supernod on your PC appeared only from Skype 3.0). Since December 2010, Skype has begun to host some supernotes in the Amazon EC2 cloud .

Having bought Skype, the Microsoft company continued the begun. In 2012, it almost completely transferred supernods to its servers , which are hosted in the Azure cloud.

Thus, in 2012, an even greater centralization of infrastructure took place: instead of 48+ thousand supernods, the P2P network of Skype began to pass traffic through 10+ thousand mega-supernodos at Microsoft hosting. The company explained that this "has significantly improved system security and quality of service, given the sharply increased number of users." Each supernod in the old system could serve about 800 users, and new Microsoft nodes can hold up to 100 thousand connections.

Changes in the Skype infrastructure running by Microsoft - the complete transfer of supernods to the Azure cloud and their transformation into mega-supernods - have become the most fundamental change of the Skype infrastructure in the entire history of this service.

Microsoft had to refute the chargesin that it made changes to the Skype architecture in order to provide law enforcement agencies with more convenient access to user communications. The company stressed that the transition to the internal hosting of "superuser" does not provide for monitoring and recording calls. “Superruns” help Skype customers find each other online so they can connect to make a call via Skype.

In 2012, Skype Development and Management Director Mark Gillett (Mark Gillett) explainedthat supernotes are needed only so that individual Skype clients can find each other on the network and establish a connection, and further data exchange between them is already going directly in an encrypted form, without any involvement of central servers. Supernods participate in communications only in certain specific situations when it is necessary, for example, during group video chats, where the host aggregates video from all participants and transmits it to the network, for which it may not have enough bandwidth.

One way or another, by 2016 it can be stated that Microsoft is completing the transfer of Skype infrastructure to cloud hosting. Yesterday, in a corporate blog published a messagein which developers tell why infrastructure is migrating to the cloud. According to them, it provides a higher stability of communication, especially such functions as file sharing and video calls, as well as the most recent innovations - mobile group video chats , Skype-translator and Skype-bots .

It is obvious that such functions cannot work in the usual peer-to-peer architecture without central servers. For example, file transfer used to be available only if the sender and recipient are online. In the new version of the client, when transferring via the cloud, you can send a file, even if the recipient is currently disconnected from the Network.

"The transfer of infrastructure to the cloud is still ongoing and is not completed yet,"writes Gurdip Pall, vice president of Skype and Skype for Business. He mentions some of Skype’s failures, including sync failures and latency notifications. The company is working on solving technical problems, making changes to the client code and encourages all users to install the latest version of the client , where these bugs are fixed and fully supported to work with the new cloud infrastructure.

In connection with the migration to the new infrastructure , plans are being changed to support versions for different operating systems .

Plans for supporting different platforms are listed in the support section of the official website.

For example, in the version of Skype for Linux, which came out a week ago, the following requirements are indicated: Ubuntu 10.04+, Debian 6.0+, Fedora 16+, OpenSUSE 12.1+, 256 MB of RAM, additional software: Qt 4.6, D-Bus 1.0.0, libasound 1.0.18, Pulse Audio 1.0 ( Pulse Audio 4.0 recommended for better performance), BlueZ 4.0 (recommended).

The client for Android version 6.2 and above works only with Android 4.0.3+ . Users with earlier versions of Android are offered to use the Skype 4 client, where there will be no group video calls and other latest features. The same applies to the client for iOS: the last client works only on iOS 8 and higher.

Support for Skype for Windows Phone 8, Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows RT will end on November 1, 2016 .

From November 1, 2016, support for older versions of OS X also ceases. The new client only works on Mac OS X 10.9 or higher. Other users are recommended to run a web client with limited functionality.

In the future, Microsoft intends to focus on developing a fast and productive UWP (Universal Windows Platform) application for Windows 10, native applications for iPhone and Android, as well as web versions of the client for all other operating systems, such as earlier versions of Windows, Mac and Linux. . This web client will work on ORTC or WebRTC web technologies.





Microsoft points out that moving Skype to the cloud requires tremendous technical effort, but it is absolutely necessary to ensure the development of the service in the future.

Unfortunately, Microsoft says nothing about the implementation of end-to-end encryption. Skype protocol is proprietary and undocumented, the program code is closed. No one knows exactly how communications are encrypted, how secure encryption is used, and what restrictions it has. Skype program remains a kind of "black box". There are APIs to add your own encryption and use it on the Skype network.

All instant messengers one by one add end-to-end encryption. The encryption function becomes mandatory for instant messengers. This is especially true now thatmassive wiretapping of Internet traffic is being introduced even in Russia .

Without reliable encryption, it will probably be difficult for Skype to maintain its position on the instant messenger market in such a competitive environment.