MON: Management overlay networks for distributed systems

The recent deployment of large distributed computing systems such as content distribution networks and the Planet-Lab has made it possible for researchers and practitioners to experiment with real world, large scale distributed applications. However, running an application in such an environment is difficult, due to the scale and frequent node failures of such systems. Thus, an important tool is needed that helps application developers/deployers to manage their applications. Our goal in this work is to develop MON, an extremely lightweight and failure resilient system for managing distributed applications. MON allows users to execute instant management commands on the distributed computing nodes, such as query the current status of the application, or start/stop a process on the distributed nodes. The commands are propagated to all the nodes and executed on each node, and the results are aggregated and returned back. We believe the ability to execute such instant commands is especially useful for the initial deployment of a distributed application, or for the monitoring and diagnoistics of (unexpected) application failures.