A modern enterprise datacenter is a complex, multi-layered system whose components often interact in unpredictable ways. Yet, to keep operational costs low and maximize efficiency, we would like to foresee the impact of changing workloads, updating configurations, modifying policies, or deploying new services.

In this talk, I will share our research group’s ongoing work on Strymon: a system for predicting datacenter behavior in hypothetical scenarios using queryable online simulation. Strymon leverages existing logging and monitoring pipelines of modern production datacenters to ingest cross-layer events in a streaming fashion and predict possible effects of such events in what-if scenarios. Predictions are made online by simulating the hypothetical datacenter state alongside the real one. Driven by a real-use case from our industrial partners, I will highlight the challenges we are facing in building Strymon to support a diverse set of data representations, input sources, query languages, and execution models.

Finally, I will share our initial design decisions and give an overview of Timely Dataflow; a high-performance distributed streaming engine and our platform of choice for Strymon’s core implementation.