Abstract: The generation, actuation, and enforcement of policies within a distributed computing system is provided. The policies are employed to manage the resources of the system. The resources include virtualized resources, such as virtual machines (VMs) and virtual storage disks (VSDs). A policy includes a rule and scope. Enforcing a policy includes applying the rule to resources that are within the policy's scope. Policies are employed to constrain the leasing period and reclaim leased resources, as well constrain the access of certain users to specific operations on the leased resources. Policies may be created via a UI that automatically generates a policy encoding. The policy is registered and accessed via a policy store. When multiple policies target a particular resource, merging strategies are applied to the multiple policies, to generate an effective policy that is consistent with the multiple policies and is enforced on the particular resource.

Abstract: The generation, actuation, and enforcement of policies within a distributed computing system is provided. The policies are employed to manage the resources of the system. The resources include virtualized resources, such as virtual machines (VMs) and virtual storage disks (VSDs). A policy includes a rule and scope. Enforcing a policy includes applying the rule to resources that are within the policy's scope. Policies are employed to constrain the leasing period and reclaim leased resources, as well constrain the access of certain users to specific operations on the leased resources. Policies may be created via a UI that automatically generates a policy encoding. The policy is registered and accessed via a policy store. When multiple policies target a common resource, merging strategies are applied to the multiple policies.

Abstract: The generation, actuation, and enforcement of policies within a distributed computing system is provided. The policies are employed to manage the resources of the system. The resources include virtualized resources, such as virtual machines (VMs) and virtual storage disks (VSDs). A policy includes a rule and scope. Enforcing a policy includes applying the rule to resources that are within the policy's scope. Policies are employed to constrain the leasing period and reclaim leased resources, as well constrain the access of certain users to specific operations on the leased resources. Policies may be created via a UI that automatically generates a policy encoding. The policy is registered and accessed via a policy store. When multiple policies target a common resource, merging strategies are applied to the multiple policies.

Abstract: Detecting an encoding system used to encode computer readable text or data across a wide variety of encoding systems. When a user attempts to download and use text or data on his or her computer, encoded data is passed from the desired text or data file to a series of code readers. Each code reader is programmed to read encoded data according to the rules of a given encoding system. When a given code reader is unable to validate a byte of data according to the encoding system rules associated with that reader, that reader is deactivated. This process of elimination leads to a single reader and a single encoding system. If the list of readers is not eliminated to a single reader, ambiguity resolution is performed to narrow the list of readers to a single reader. Once the list of active readers is narrowed to one, the encoding system associated with that reader is returned as the encoding system with which the data is encoded.