Building Microsoft-powered native video meetings on LinkedIn

We created video meetings by building a brand-new service to handle all communication between Azure Communication Services and the rest of LinkedIn, which allows us to consolidate all the authentication and business logic around video meetings. Additionally, we have developed video conferencing client SDKs for each platform to consolidate interaction with the server stack and provide a standardized user interface for video meetings.

LinkedIn Conferencing Infrastructure was built as a one-stop video conferencing solution catered to LinkedIn. Products that integrate with this conferencing platform get reliability, scale, monitoring, and trust and security integrations out-of-the-box. LICI empowers partner teams to build new conferencing features while acting as the control plane between the LinkedIn client libraries, Azure Communication Services, and LinkedIn products.

Some of the areas that LICI handles include:

• Conferencing infrastructure user access credentials and tokens. Orchestration and setup of the conference.
• Managing the conference lifecycle.
• Managing the participant roster.
• Access control of both the overall conferencing infrastructure and individual conferences.

Azure Communications Services is built on the same technology that powers Microsoft Teams, which already supports millions of users daily. When a LinkedIn member wants to start a video meeting, LinkedIn services will communicate with Azure Communication Services to generate a user token and call token for the occasion. LinkedIn apps then join the call by using the Azure client library, providing the specified call token and identifying the LinkedIn member with the user token.

As customers of Azure, we have helped tune and influence the roadmap to include our necessary feature set. With our testing and feedback loop, we have also influenced the monitoring signals and events that are useful for customers to ingest from Azure Communication Services. Looking at the API from a customer perspective, we have helped them tune their API signature. The Azure team has also been very responsive and agile in making any desired changes.

With multiple teams working to build the conferencing experience, we had to make sure the collaboration and integration went seamlessly. We achieved this through regular working sessions and bug bashing across teams.

To make sure there are no regressions introduced with new iterations of the service, we run validation tests that mimic the user behaviour in both early integration and production environments on a cron-like schedule.