Towards Cost Effective Server Population Estimation: A Case Study of Twitch

Internet services such as email and video streaming are daily necessity for many of us. To scale to the demand of service quality and continuity, major services today operate on server clusters. Growingly large, long-lasting, and dynamic, these server clusters are pretty much ecosystems themselves. Drawing from the observation, we see a window of opportunity applying techniques in ecology, e.g., Capture-Mark-Recapture (i.e., CMR) for server population estimation, a problem fundamental to cluster monitoring.