Acala: Aggregate Monitoring for Geo-Distributed Cluster Federations

Abstract

Distributed monitoring is an essential functionality to allow large cluster federations to efficiently schedule applications on a set of available geo-distributed resources. However, periodically reporting the precise status of each available server is both unnecessary to allow accurate scheduling and unscalable when the number of servers grows. This paper proposes Acala, a monitoring framework for geo-distributed cluster federations which aims to provide the management cluster with aggregate information about the entire cluster instead of individual servers. Our evaluations, based on actual deployment under controlled environment in the geo-distributed Grid'5000 testbed, show that Acala reduces the cross-cluster network traffic by up to 99% and the scrape duration by up to 55%.