Internet Servers Doing the Buzz Shuffle - Server Optimization
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Just like the weather for bees, request streams for Internet servers vary depending on the popularity of a site at a particular time and how users react when waiting for service. If too many servers are allocated to one service (think of an overabundance of bees at one flower patch), the server will have to wait longer to find a request to serve. This indeed wastes time, causing hosting companies to lose revenue and waste energy.
In order to maximize their efficiency close to that of the honeybee colony, the server orchestration algorithm must continually acquire information regarding prospective co-hosted services and the request load on their service queues. The algorithm copies the same signals, cues, etc. of a honeybee colony to gather the information.
Each server can be thought of as a bee, either a forager or a scout. The dance floor that was talked about earlier is represented by an advertisement board. The advertisement, or dance, appears on the board for given period of time, telling the “foragers” where service is needed. The ads for locations with the most demand and income potential last longer in order to recruit the required amount of servers. The location is displayed as a virtual service identifier because they are where a new virtual server is needed.
The scout server migrates randomly to a virtual server and gathers the information to be displayed on the advertisement board. A forager server chooses an advertisement at random and migrates to whatever virtual server it is representing.
The orchestration algorithm depends on each server to produce information about its own service queue and make it available for all other servers to view and act on, if necessary. The server compares its own revenue rate with the hosting center's and calculates the probability of advertising its own locations or reallocating itself to another virtual server.
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