MON: on-demand overlays for distributed system management
Liang Jin, Steven Y. Ko, Indranil Sen Gupta, Klara Nahrstedt · 2005
This paper presents the management overlay network (MON) system that we are building and running on the PlanetLab testbed. MON is a distributed system designed to facilitate the management of large distributed applications. Toward this goal, MON builds on-demand overlay structures that allow users to execute instant management commands, such as query the current status of the application, or push software updates to all the nodes. The on-demand approach enables MON to be light-weight, requiring minimum amount of resources when no commands are executed. It also frees MON from complex failure repair mechanisms, since no overlay structure is maintained for a prolonged time. MON is currently running on more than 300 nodes on the Planet-Lab. Our initial experiments on the PlanetLab show that MON has good performance, both in terms of command response time and achieved bandwidth for software push.