The present disclosure relates to systems, methods, and computer readable media for predicting deployment growth on one or more node clusters and selectively permitting deployment requests on a per cluster basis. For example, systems disclosed herein may apply tenant growth prediction system trained to output a deployment growth classification indicative of a predicted growth of deployments on a node cluster. The system disclosed herein may further utilize the deployment growth classification to determine whether a deployment request may be permitted while maintaining a sufficiently sized capacity buffer to avoid deployment failures for existing deployments previously implemented on the node cluster. By selectively permitting or denying deployments based on a variety of factors, the systems described herein can more efficiently utilize cluster resources on a per-cluster basis without causing a significant increase in deployment failures for existing customers.

Distributed virtual environments (DVEs) have been an active area of research and engineering for more than 20 years. The most widely deployed DVEs are network games such as Quake, Halo, and World of Warcraft (WoW), with millions of users and billions of dollars in annual revenue. Deployed DVEs remain expensive centralized implementations despite significant research outlining ways to distribute DVE workloads. This dissertation shows previous DVE research evaluations are inconsistent with deployed DVE needs. Assumptions about avatar movement and proximity – fundamental scale factors – do not match WoW’s workload, and likely the workload of other deployed DVEs. Alternate workload models are explored and preliminary conclusions presented. Using realistic workloads it is shown that a fully decentralized DVE cannot be deployed to today’s consumers, regardless of its overhead. Residential broadband speeds are improving, and this limitation will eventually disappear. When it does, appropriate security mechanisms will be a fundamental requirement for technology adoption. A trusted auditing system (“Carbon”) is presented which has good security, scalability, and resource characteristics for decentralized DVEs. When performing exhaustive auditing, Carbon adds 27% network overhead to a decentralized DVE with a WoW-like workload. This resource consumption can be reduced significantly, depending upon the DVE’s risk tolerance. Finally, the Pairwise Random Protocol (PRP) is described. PRP enables adversaries to fairly resolve probabilistic activities, an ability missing from most decentralized DVE security proposals. Thus, this dissertation’s contribution is to address two of the obstacles for deploying research on decentralized DVE architectures. First, lack of evidence that research results apply to existing DVEs. Second, the lack of security systems combining appropriate security guarantees with acceptable overhead.

Broadly deployed distributed virtual environments (DVE's) are based upon client-server architectures. Significant research over the last decade proposes a variety of distributed topologies for message propagation to enhance scalability and performance. We ran simulations using traces from World of Warcraft (WoW) and typical broadband speeds, and found that DVE's such as WoW could not employ P2P message propagation schemes. We found pure P2P pub-sub solutions would occasionally saturate residential broadband connections, and would result in average latency more than lOx greater than client-server solutions. To our surprise, we discovered message aggregation before transmission can not only reduce bandwidth requirements, but also reduce latency in both client-server and P2P message propagation schemes.

Distributed Virtual Environment (DVE) topology management and message propagation schemes have been proposed for many years. Evaluating DVE message propagation schemes requires a variety of assumptions whose verity significantly affects results, such as details about avatar movement characteristics. We implemented two schemes for waypoint and hotspot detection, and examined their applicability for characterising avatar movement. We confirmed that waypoint detection does not yield good results for characterising human avatar movement, and gained new insight into why by rendering avatar movement as point clouds. We implemented an existing hotspot detection model, and proposed an enhancement to help overcome one limitation of cell-based hotspot detection. We were able to immediately apply this hotspot detection technique to help analyse group movement. We discovered that although a third of movement time in the battlegrounds is spent in inter-node journeys, less than a quarter of these journeys are made in groups.

Peer-to-peer distributed virtual environments (DVE's) distribute state tracking and state transitions. Many DVE's - such as online games - require ways to fairly determine the outcome of probabilistic events. While trivial when a trusted third party is involved, resolving these actions fairly between adversaries without a trusted third party is much more difficult. This paper proposes the Pairwise Random Protocol (PRP), which uses secure coin flipping to enable adversaries to fairly determine the result of a probabilistic event without a trusted third party. Three different variations of PRP are presented, and the time impact and network overhead are examined. We conclude that PRP enables DVE's to distribute the work of determining probabilistic events between adversaries without loss of security or fairness, and with acceptable overhead.

Evaluating DVE topology management and message propagation schemes requires avatar movement models. Most models are based on reasoned assumptions rather than measured data, potentially biasing evaluation. We measured player movement in World of Warcraft battlegrounds, and compared our observations against common assumptions about player avatar movement and navigation. We found that when modeling a highly interactive DVE such as a battleground, a waypoint model is not sufficient to describe most avatar movement. We were surprised to find that despite game incentives for grouping, the majority of avatar movement between objectives is individual, not grouped. Finally, we found that a hotspot-based model for avatar movement is consistent with our traces.

Abstract Many Peer-to-Peer Distributed Virtual Environments (P2P DVE’s) have

Many Peer-to-Peer Distributed Virtual Environments (P2P DVE’s) have been proposed, but none are widely deployed. One significant barrier to deployment is lack of security. This paper presents Carbon, a trusted auditing system for P2P DVE’s which provides reasonable security with low per-client overhead. DVE’s using Carbon perform offline auditing to evaluate DVE client correctness. Carbon audits can be used to catch DVE clients which break DVE rules – cheaters – so the DVE can punish them. We analyze the impact of applying Carbon to a peer-to-peer game with attributes similar to World of Warcraft. We show that 99.9% of cheaters – of a certain profile – can be caught with guided auditing and 2.3% bandwidth overhead, or 100% of cheaters can be caught with exhaustive auditing and 27% bandwidth overhead. The surprisingly low overhead for exhaustive auditing is the result of the small payload in most DVE packet updates, compared to the larger aggregate payloads in audit messages. Finally, we compare Carbon to PeerReview, and show that for DVE scenarios Carbon consumes significantly less resources – in typical cases by an order of magnitude – while sacrificing little protection.