WANify: Gauging and Balancing Runtime WAN Bandwidth for Geo-distributed Data Analytics

TL;DR

WANify is a framework that dynamically predicts WAN bandwidth using machine learning to optimize data transfer and reduce latency and costs in geo-distributed data analytics systems.

Contribution

It introduces a machine learning-based method to accurately gauge runtime WAN bandwidth and optimize connection strategies considering network dynamics and heterogeneity.

Findings

WANify improves WAN throughput by balancing link capacities.

It reduces latency and costs by up to 26% and 16%.

The approach effectively handles network dynamics and heterogeneity.

Abstract

Accurate wide area network (WAN) bandwidth (BW) is essential for geo-distributed data analytics (GDA) systems to make optimal decisions such as data and task placement to improve performance. Existing GDA systems, however, measure WAN BW statically and independently between data centers (DCs), while data transfer occurs dynamically and simultaneously among DCs during workload execution. Also, they use a single connection WAN BW that cannot capture actual WAN capacities between distant DCs. Such inaccurate WAN BWs yield sub-optimal decisions, inflating overall query latency and cost. In this paper, we present WANify, a new framework that precisely and dynamically gauges achievable runtime WAN BW using a machine learning prediction scheme, decision tree-based Random Forest. This helps GDA systems make better decisions yielding reduced latency and costs including WAN BW monitoring costs. Based on predicted runtime WAN BW, WANify determines the optimal number of heterogeneous parallel connections for data transfer among DCs. This approach improves performance without additional, or even at reduced cost, by fully exploiting available WAN capacities. In addition, WANify considers dynamics like network and workloads, and heterogeneity like skewed data, heterogeneous compute resources, and a varying number of DCs while making decisions. The WANify prototype running on state-of-the-art GDA systems is evaluated on AWS with 8 geo-distributed DCs. Results show that WANify enhances WAN throughput by balancing between the strongest and weakest WAN links, enabling GDA systems to reduce latency and cost by up to 26% and 16% respectively with minimal effort, all while handling dynamics and heterogeneity efficiently.