DBalancer: distributed load balancing for NoSQL data-stores

Abstract

Unanticipated load spikes or skewed data access patterns may lead to severe performance degradation in data serving applications, a typical problem of distributed NoSQL data-stores. In these cases, load balancing is a necessary operation. In this demonstration, we present the DBalancer, a generic distributed module that can be installed on top of a typical NoSQL data-store and provide an efficient and highly configurable load balancing mechanism. Balancing is performed by simple message exchanges and typical data movement operations supported by most modern NoSQL data-stores. We present the system's architecture, we describe in detail its modules and their interaction and we implement a suite of different algorithms on top of it. Through a web-based interactive GUI we allow the users to launch NoSQL clusters of various sizes, to apply numerous skewed and dynamic workloads and to compare the implemented load balancing algorithms. Videos and graphs showcasing each algorithm's effect on a number of indicative performance and cost metrics will be created on the fly for every setup. By browsing the results of different executions users will be able to grasp each algorithm's balancing mechanisms and performance impact in a number of representative setups.