What Goes on Behind the Curtain? Interview with Mikogo’s Infrastructure-Guru, Marcel Maron

Marcel Maron is the master­mind behind Mikogo’s machinery, he is the man respon­sible for what goes on behind the scenes. In this inter­view, Marcel outlines the comple­xity involved in making a product like Mikogo run so smoothly, and sheds light on the global presence of Mikogo’s IT infrastructure.

Q: Where are Mikogo’s servers located, and what factors must you consider when choo­sing where our servers should be?
Marcel Maron, IT Opera­tions Manager: Mikogo is a globally avail­able cloud-service. Since Mikogo is hand­ling a large amount of data in real-time a reli­able, always avail­able, and extre­mely well-connected infra­st­ruc­ture is needed. We have distri­buted our server systems to well-connected data centers around the globe. There­fore, we ensure that the servers are easy to access from almost anywhere in the world, and that there is the best possible trans­mis­sion between Mikogo users.

Q: When a user opens the Mikogo soft­ware and starts a session, what happens in the back­ground to estab­lish the desktop sharing between multiple parties?
MM: From the orga­nizer, Mikogo estab­lishes an AES 256-bit encrypted connec­tion to the nearest avail­able server. Parti­ci­pants that connect to that session via the HTML Viewer or the Mikogo Viewer are also connected to this server. The server then gets the encrypted data from the organizer/presenter and trans­mits this data to each parti­ci­pant according to their avail­able bandwidth.

Q: In the recent past it was a very compli­cated and tedious process to conduct screen sharing and remote control of another computer, how is it that Mikogo simply requires a session ID to do this now?
MM: Ok, I’ll try to keep this concise 🙂 When the orga­nizer starts a session, their host soft­ware program contacts the Mikogo data­base server and estab­lishes a secure connec­tion. The data­base server gene­rates a random session ID and sends it back to the organizer’s Mikogo soft­ware, toge­ther with infor­ma­tion about the features and confi­gu­ra­tion for that session, such as the swit­ching server address and port number. The host program then estab­lishes two connec­tions to the swit­ching server – one for the screen data and another for control data such as chat messages and mouse cursor posi­tions.
The parti­ci­pant runs the connec­tion soft­ware program on their computer and enters the session ID. The soft­ware will estab­lish a secure connec­tion to the Mikogo data­base server reques­ting to join the session with that parti­cular session ID. The Mikogo data­base will verify if the session ID exists and will then respond back to the connec­tion program with the IP address and port number of the swit­ching server on which the session has been started by the orga­nizer. The Mikogo connec­tion program will then estab­lish two secure connec­tions to the swit­ching server and request to join the session with this parti­cular session ID. The Mikogo swit­ching server will then connect that parti­ci­pant to the respec­tive session and relay screen updates to the parti­ci­pant.
It is of course more compli­cated than that and there are more processes involved for estab­li­shing connec­tions, but in a nuts­hell that is how it works.

Q: Impres­sive! How did Mikogo need to change and upgrade its infra­st­ruc­ture in order to accom­mo­date the new voice-over IP func­tion?
MM: Similar to screen-sharing, audio-trans­mis­sion is a real-time service. It is very important to ensure that audio data is sent quickly from one end-point to another, and in the correct order. Other than recrea­ting a whole screen out of some changed packets, audio has to be directly processed as it enters the computer. There­fore, we have to ensure that the audio servers not only have high avai­la­bi­lity, but also that they are very well connected to the Internet and acces­sible in milli­se­conds from each end-point.

Q: How does Mikogo provide customer support for our clients – both support chat and phone support?
MM: We offer support through various chan­nels. First, we are of course avail­able via tele­phone or email. Secondly, we are ready to accept requests via a support form avail­able on our website. Next under http://www.mikogo.com/support custo­mers have direct access to our ticket system, ZenDesk. And last but not least, we offer a chat option on our website.

Discus­sion: Got a ques­tion about how the Mikogo soft­ware works? Leave it in a comment below!