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Ares + Polaris: Complete Feature Matrix

Last Updated: December 2025
Total Features: 26 (22 Ares + 4 Polaris)
Completed: 14/26


📋 Table of Contents

  1. Feature Categories
  2. Ares Features (22)
  3. Polaris Features (4)
  4. Implementation Roadmap
  5. Feature Dependencies

Feature Categories

ARES (22 features)
├── Core Scheduling Engine (6)      - Job placement, fairness, priorities
├── Control Plane Design (6)        - Global coordination, federation
├── Resource Awareness (4)           - GPU, NUMA, network topology
├── Job Execution & Reliability (5) - Lifecycle, retries, exactly-once
└── Observability & Security (5)    - Metrics, dashboards, RBAC

POLARIS (4 features)                 - Observability platform for Ares
├── Global Metrics Pipeline
├── Unified Dashboard & Tracing
├── Cluster & Job Health Dashboard
└── Audit Logging & Policy Validation

Ares Features

Core Scheduling Engine

These features handle the core job scheduling logic - where jobs run, how resources are allocated, and prioritization.


Feature Matrix

Category 1: Core Scheduling Engine

# Feature Description Status
1 Multi-Cluster Scheduling Schedule workloads across multiple K8s clusters Done
2 Multi-Region Federation Global scheduling across data centers and regions Done
3 Fair Resource Allocation DRF / weighted fair queuing to prevent monopolization Future
4 Topology-Aware Scheduling Co-locate by network / rack / zone proximity Done
5 Priority & Preemption High-priority jobs preempt lower-priority jobs Future
6 Exactly-Once Execution Distributed leases + fencing tokens Done

Category 2: Control Plane Design

# Feature Description Status
7 Global Control Plane Central orchestrator coordinating per-cluster schedulers Done
8 Cluster Autonomy Local failover when global plane unreachable Future
9 Dynamic Cluster Registration Clusters join/leave dynamically without downtime Done
10 Health & Heartbeat Health synchronization across clusters Done
11 Eventual Consistency CRDTs or Raft for critical state Future
12 API Gateway Unified global API endpoint for job submission Done

Category 3: Resource Awareness

# Feature Description Status
13 GPU-Aware Scheduling GPU count, model, NVLink topology, NUMA affinity Done
14 NUMA Awareness Minimize cross-NUMA memory penalties Future
15 Network Bandwidth Aware Network latency / bandwidth in scheduling Future
16 Heterogeneous Hardware CPUs, GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, custom accelerators Future

Category 4: Job Execution & Reliability

# Feature Description Status
17 Job Lifecycle Management Pending → Running → Succeeded / Failed Done
18 Idempotent Submission Client-side deduplication using request IDs Done
19 Distributed Locking Lease-based coordination for exactly-once Done
20 Checkpointing Persist mid-job state for fault recovery Future
21 Backoff & Retry Policy Exponential backoff with jitter for failed jobs Future

Category 5: Observability & Security

# Feature Description Status
22 Global Metrics Pipeline Prometheus / OpenTelemetry metrics federation Future
23 Unified Dashboard Grafana dashboards and distributed tracing Future
24 Health Dashboard Real-time job latency, failure rates, utilization Future
25 RBAC + Tenant Isolation Namespace / tenant quota and access control Future
26 Audit Logging Central logging and policy validation Future

Summary: 12 implemented features · 14 planned enhancements

#1: Multi-Cluster Scheduling

Purpose: Schedule workloads across multiple Kubernetes clusters
Complexity: High
Status: 🚧 In Progress (Phase 2)
Dependencies: #7 (Global Control Plane)

Problem:

Single cluster: Limited to 100 GPUs
Multi-cluster: Scale to 1000+ GPUs across regions

Design:

  • Global job queue (etcd)
  • Per-cluster resource tracking
  • Cross-cluster placement scoring
  • Network latency awareness

Implementation:

type ClusterState struct {
    ClusterID   string
    AvailableGPUs int
    Latency     time.Duration
    Load        float64
}

func PlaceJobAcrossClusters(job Job, clusters []ClusterState) string {
    // Score each cluster
    scores := make(map[string]float64)
    for _, cluster := range clusters {
        score := calculateClusterScore(job, cluster)
        scores[cluster.ClusterID] = score
    }
    return chooseBestCluster(scores)
}

Metrics:

  • Cross-cluster placement decisions/sec
  • Average job latency per cluster
  • Cluster load distribution (fairness)

#2: Multi-Region Federation

Purpose: Global scheduling decisions spanning geographic regions
Complexity: High
Status: ⏳ Planned (Phase 2)
Dependencies: #1, #7, #8, #9

Problem:

US-WEST-1: 200 GPUs (high load)
US-EAST-1: 150 GPUs (low load)  
EU-WEST-1: 100 GPUs (idle)

User in US wants to run job → Should schedule in EU?
  - Pro: Faster start (idle capacity)
  - Con: Higher latency, data transfer costs

Design:

  • Global coordinator (Raft consensus)
  • Region-aware placement
  • Data gravity considerations
  • Cost optimization

Challenges:

  • Network latency between regions (50-150ms)
  • Data locality (datasets may be region-locked)
  • Regulatory compliance (data residency laws)

#3: Fair Resource Allocation

Purpose: Prevent resource starvation using DRF (Dominant Resource Fairness)
Complexity: Medium
Status: ✅ Complete (MVP)
Dependencies: None

Problem:

Tenant A: Submits 1000 jobs (starves everyone)
Tenant B: Submits 10 jobs (gets nothing)
Tenant C: Submits 5 jobs (gets nothing)

UNFAIR! 

Solution - Dominant Resource Fairness (DRF):

Each tenant gets fair share of their "dominant resource"

Tenant A: Dominant = CPUs (uses 80% CPU, 20% GPU)
Tenant B: Dominant = GPUs (uses 30% CPU, 90% GPU)

Allocate to B first (GPU is scarce), then A

Implementation:

type TenantUsage struct {
    TenantID    string
    CPUShare    float64  // 0.0 - 1.0
    GPUShare    float64  // 0.0 - 1.0
    DominantShare float64 // max(CPUShare, GPUShare)
}

func ScheduleWithDRF(tenants []TenantUsage, job Job) string {
    // Sort by dominant share (ascending)
    sort.Slice(tenants, func(i, j int) bool {
        return tenants[i].DominantShare < tenants[j].DominantShare
    })
    
    // Allocate to tenant with lowest dominant share
    return tenants[0].TenantID
}

Guarantees:

  • Share guarantee: Each tenant gets ≥ 1/n of resources (n = # tenants)
  • Strategy-proof: No incentive to lie about requirements
  • Envy-free: No tenant prefers another's allocation

#4: Topology-Aware Scheduling

Purpose: Co-locate workloads by network/rack/zone proximity + GPU topology
Complexity: Medium-High
Status: ✅ Complete (MVP - basic)
Dependencies: #13 (GPU-Aware Scheduling)

Problem:

Job needs 8 GPUs

Bad placement:
  GPU-0, GPU-4, GPU-9, GPU-13, GPU-18, GPU-22, GPU-27, GPU-31
  → Spread across 4 nodes, high cross-node traffic

Good placement:
  GPU-0, GPU-1, GPU-2, GPU-3, GPU-4, GPU-5, GPU-6, GPU-7
  → All on one node, NVLink communication

Design:

Topology Hierarchy:
  Region → Zone → Rack → Node → GPU
  
Scoring:
  Same node:       +100 points
  Same rack:       +50 points  
  Same zone:       +20 points
  Same region:     +5 points
  Different region: -50 points

Implementation:

type TopologyScore struct {
    SameNode      int
    SameRack      int
    SameZone      int
    CrossRegion   int
}

func ScorePlacement(gpus []GPU) float64 {
    score := 0.0
    for i := 0; i < len(gpus)-1; i++ {
        for j := i+1; j < len(gpus); j++ {
            if gpus[i].Node == gpus[j].Node {
                score += 100
            } else if gpus[i].Rack == gpus[j].Rack {
                score += 50
            } else if gpus[i].Zone == gpus[j].Zone {
                score += 20
            }
            // etc.
        }
    }
    return score
}

#5: Priority & Preemption

Purpose: Allow high-priority workloads to preempt lower-priority jobs
Complexity: Medium
Status: ✅ Complete (MVP)
Dependencies: #17 (Job Lifecycle Management)

Problem:

Production ML inference: CRITICAL (needs GPUs NOW)
Research experiment: LOW (can wait)

If all GPUs busy with research → Inference waits → BAD

Solution - Priority Levels:

Priority 0: CRITICAL    (production inference, urgent)
Priority 1: HIGH        (important training jobs)
Priority 2: NORMAL      (standard workloads)
Priority 3: LOW         (research, batch jobs)
Priority 4: BEST_EFFORT (can be killed anytime)

Preemption Logic:

func CanPreempt(running Job, incoming Job) bool {
    // Can only preempt if priority gap ≥ 2
    priorityGap := running.Priority - incoming.Priority
    return priorityGap >= 2
}

func Preempt(victim Job) {
    // Graceful shutdown
    victim.SendSIGTERM()
    
    // Wait 30 seconds
    time.Sleep(30 * time.Second)
    
    // Force kill if still running
    if victim.IsRunning() {
        victim.SendSIGKILL()
    }
    
    // Checkpoint state (if supported)
    victim.Checkpoint()
}

#6: Exactly-Once Job Execution

Purpose: Guarantee no duplicate execution under retries/failures
Complexity: High
Status: ✅ Complete (MVP)
Dependencies: #18, #19

See: EXACTLY_ONCE.md for full design

Three-Layer Defense:

Layer 1: Request Deduplication (Redis)
  Same RequestID → Same JobID
  
Layer 2: Distributed Leasing (etcd)
  Only one worker holds lease
  TTL-based expiration
  
Layer 3: Fencing Tokens (etcd)
  Monotonic counters prevent zombies
  Atomic compare-and-swap

Guaranteed Properties:

  • ✅ No duplicates (job never executes >1 time)
  • ✅ No lost executions (result persists)
  • ✅ Convergence (recovers from any failure)

Control Plane Design

These features handle global coordination, cluster management, and control plane architecture.


#7: Global Control Plane

Purpose: Central orchestrator coordinating per-cluster schedulers
Complexity: High
Status: ⏳ Planned (Phase 2)
Dependencies: None (foundational)

Design:

                  ┌─────────────────┐
                  │ Global Control  │
                  │     Plane       │
                  └────────┬────────┘
                           │
         ┌─────────────────┼─────────────────┐
         │                 │                 │
         ↓                 ↓                 ↓
  ┌─────────────┐   ┌─────────────┐   ┌─────────────┐
  │  Cluster 1  │   │  Cluster 2  │   │  Cluster 3  │
  │  Scheduler  │   │  Scheduler  │   │  Scheduler  │
  └─────────────┘   └─────────────┘   └─────────────┘

Responsibilities:

  • Accept job submissions (single entry point)
  • Route jobs to appropriate cluster
  • Track cluster health
  • Global resource accounting
  • SLA enforcement

Implementation:

type GlobalScheduler struct {
    clusters map[string]*ClusterState
    jobQueue *JobQueue
    
    // Raft consensus for HA
    raft *raft.Raft
}

func (g *GlobalScheduler) SubmitJob(job Job) error {
    // 1. Validate job
    // 2. Choose cluster
    cluster := g.chooseCluster(job)
    
    // 3. Route to cluster scheduler
    return cluster.ScheduleJob(job)
}

#8: Cluster Autonomy

Purpose: Local failover control when global plane unreachable
Complexity: Medium
Status: ⏳ Planned (Phase 2)
Dependencies: #7

Problem:

Global control plane crashes
         ↓
Clusters can't schedule new jobs
         ↓
Complete outage (BAD!)

Solution - Autonomous Mode:

1. Cluster detects global plane unreachable (heartbeat timeout)
2. Cluster switches to AUTONOMOUS mode
3. Cluster schedules jobs locally (with local queue)
4. When global plane returns:
   - Reconcile state
   - Resume normal mode

Implementation:

type ClusterMode int

const (
    FEDERATED  ClusterMode = 0  // Normal: global control
    AUTONOMOUS ClusterMode = 1  // Failover: local control
)

func (c *ClusterScheduler) HeartbeatLoop() {
    for {
        if !c.global.IsReachable() {
            c.mode = AUTONOMOUS
            log.Warn("Global plane unreachable, switching to autonomous mode")
        } else if c.mode == AUTONOMOUS {
            c.mode = FEDERATED
            c.reconcileState()
        }
        time.Sleep(10 * time.Second)
    }
}

#9: Dynamic Cluster Registration

Purpose: Clusters join/leave federation dynamically
Complexity: Medium
Status: ⏳ Planned (Phase 3)
Dependencies: #7, #8

Design:

New cluster comes online:
1. Cluster announces to global plane (etcd discovery)
2. Global plane validates cluster (health check)
3. Cluster added to routing table
4. Start receiving job assignments

Cluster goes offline:
1. Heartbeat timeout detected
2. Global plane marks cluster OFFLINE
3. Drain existing jobs (graceful shutdown)
4. Remove from routing table

#10: Health & Heartbeat Propagation

Purpose: Gossip-based or Raft-based health synchronization
Complexity: Medium
Status: ⏳ Planned (Phase 3)
Dependencies: #7, #9

Options:

Option A: Gossip Protocol (like Consul)

Pros: Decentralized, scales to 1000s of nodes
Cons: Eventually consistent, complex debugging

Option B: Raft Consensus (like etcd)

Pros: Strong consistency, simpler reasoning
Cons: Limited to ~100 nodes, single leader bottleneck

Likely choice: Raft (simpler, good enough for <100 clusters)


#11: Eventual Consistency + Strong Convergence

Purpose: CRDTs or Raft for critical state
Complexity: High
Status: ⏳ Planned (Phase 3)
Dependencies: #7, #10

Design Decision:

Metadata (cluster health, topology):
  → Eventual consistency OK (CRDTs)
  → Faster, scales better
  
Critical state (job assignments, leases):
  → Strong consistency required (Raft)
  → Prevents split-brain

#12: API Gateway / Custom API Server

Purpose: Unified global API for job submission
Complexity: High
Status: ⏳ Planned (Phase 3)
Dependencies: #7

Design:

RESTful API:
  POST   /api/v1/jobs           → Submit job
  GET    /api/v1/jobs/:id       → Get job status
  DELETE /api/v1/jobs/:id       → Cancel job
  GET    /api/v1/clusters       → List clusters
  GET    /api/v1/clusters/:id   → Get cluster state

Resource Awareness

These features handle intelligent resource placement based on hardware topology.


#13: GPU-Aware Scheduling with Topology

Purpose: Match GPU count, model, NVLink, NUMA affinity
Complexity: Medium-High
Status: ✅ Complete (MVP - basic)
Dependencies: None

See: GPU_TOPOLOGY.md for full design

Key Capabilities:

  • Detect GPU count, model, memory
  • Parse NVLink topology matrix
  • Score placements (NVLink +50, PCIe -30)
  • Choose optimal GPU subset

Impact: 3-5x training speedup


#14: NUMA / Memory Bandwidth Awareness

Purpose: Minimize cross-NUMA penalties
Complexity: Medium-High
Status: ⏳ Planned (Phase 2)
Dependencies: #13

Problem:

NUMA Node 0: CPU 0-15, GPU 0-3, Memory 0-63GB
NUMA Node 1: CPU 16-31, GPU 4-7, Memory 64-127GB

Job allocated: GPU-0, CPU-20, Memory-70GB
  → GPU on Node 0
  → CPU on Node 1  
  → Memory on Node 1
  → Cross-NUMA traffic (slow!)

Solution:

Allocate resources from SAME NUMA node:
  GPU-0 → CPU 0-15 → Memory 0-63GB
  
Result: Local memory access, faster

#15: Network Bandwidth & Topology Awareness

Purpose: Factor latency/bandwidth into scheduling score
Complexity: Medium-High
Status: ⏳ Planned (Phase 3)
Dependencies: #4

Design:

Network Topology:
  10 GbE switch:  Latency=0.5ms, BW=10Gbps
  40 GbE switch:  Latency=0.3ms, BW=40Gbps
  100 GbE switch: Latency=0.1ms, BW=100Gbps
  
Job requires high BW between nodes:
  → Prefer 100 GbE connected nodes

#16: Heterogeneous Hardware Scheduling

Purpose: Support CPUs, GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, custom accelerators
Complexity: Medium
Status: ⏳ Planned (Phase 2)
Dependencies: #13

Design:

type Accelerator interface {
    Type() string       // "GPU", "TPU", "FPGA"
    Model() string      // "V100", "TPUv4", "Xilinx"
    Memory() int64      // Bytes
    Supports(job Job) bool
}

func ScheduleHeterogeneous(job Job, resources []Accelerator) Accelerator {
    candidates := filterByRequirements(job, resources)
    return chooseBest(candidates)
}

Job Execution & Reliability

These features handle job lifecycle, retries, and execution guarantees.


#17: Job Lifecycle Management

Purpose: State machine for job states (Pending → Running → Succeeded/Failed)
Complexity: Low
Status: ✅ Complete (MVP)
Dependencies: None

State Machine:

        ┌─────────┐
        │ PENDING │
        └────┬────┘
             │ (worker acquires lease)
             ↓
        ┌─────────┐
        │ RUNNING │
        └────┬────┘
             │
      ┌──────┴──────┐
      │             │
      ↓             ↓
 ┌──────────┐  ┌─────────┐
 │ SUCCEEDED│  │ FAILED  │
 └──────────┘  └────┬────┘
                    │ (retry if < maxRetries)
                    ↓
               ┌──────────┐
               │ RETRYING │
               └────┬─────┘
                    │ (backoff delay)
                    ↓
               ┌─────────┐
               │ PENDING │
               └─────────┘

#18: Idempotent Job Submission

Purpose: Client-side deduplication with request IDs
Complexity: Medium
Status: ⏳ Planned (Phase 2)
Dependencies: None

Design:

Client generates RequestID (UUID)
Client submits job with RequestID
Scheduler checks Redis: "Did I see this RequestID before?"
  - YES: Return existing JobID (no-op)
  - NO: Create new job, cache RequestID → JobID mapping

Guarantees:

  • Same RequestID always returns same JobID
  • No duplicate jobs created

#19: Distributed Locking / Lease System

Purpose: Lease-based coordination for exactly-once
Complexity: Medium
Status: ✅ Complete (MVP - implicit in #6)
Dependencies: None

Design:

type Lease struct {
    JobID        string
    WorkerID     string
    FencingToken int64
    TTL          int64  // seconds
    AcquiredAt   time.Time
}

func AcquireJobLease(jobID string, workerID string, ttl int) (*Lease, error) {
    // Atomic compare-and-swap
    lease := &Lease{
        JobID:    jobID,
        WorkerID: workerID,
        FencingToken: getNextToken(),  // Monotonic counter
        TTL:      ttl,
    }
    
    // Only succeeds if no existing lease
    success := etcd.CompareAndSwap("/leases/" + jobID, nil, lease)
    if !success {
        return nil, errors.New("lease already held")
    }
    
    return lease, nil
}

#20: Checkpointing & Recovery

Purpose: Mid-job state persistence for fault recovery
Complexity: High
Status: ⏳ Planned (Phase 3)
Dependencies: #17, #21

Design:

Long-running job (10 hours):
  Checkpoint every 30 minutes
  Save model weights, optimizer state to S3
  
Job crashes at hour 5:
  Resume from last checkpoint (hour 4.5)
  Lost work: 30 minutes (not 5 hours!)

#21: Backoff & Retry Policy

Purpose: Exponential backoff with jitter, SLA-aware
Complexity: Medium
Status: ✅ Complete (MVP)
Dependencies: #17

Formula:

backoff = min(initialBackoff * multiplier^attempt, maxBackoff)
backoff += random(-25%, +25%)  // Jitter

Example:
  Attempt 1: 1s + jitter → 1.2s
  Attempt 2: 2s + jitter → 1.8s
  Attempt 3: 4s + jitter → 4.3s
  Attempt 4: 8s + jitter → 7.6s

Prevents: Thundering herd, retry storms


Observability & Security

These features provide visibility, monitoring, and access control.


#22: Global Metrics Pipeline

Purpose: Prometheus + OpenTelemetry federation
Complexity: Medium
Status: ✅ Complete (MVP)
Dependencies: None

Architecture:

Worker → Prometheus scrape
         ↓
    Push to global aggregator
         ↓
    Long-term storage (Thanos/Cortex)
         ↓
    Query via Grafana

Metrics Exposed:

  • ares_jobs_total{state="running|succeeded|failed"}
  • ares_gpu_utilization{gpu_id="0"}
  • ares_scheduling_latency_seconds
  • ares_lease_acquisitions_total

#23: Unified Dashboard & Tracing

Purpose: Grafana + Jaeger/Tempo for traces
Complexity: Low-Medium
Status: ✅ Complete (MVP)
Dependencies: #22

Features:

  • Real-time job queue view
  • GPU utilization heatmap
  • Cluster health overview
  • Distributed traces (OpenTelemetry)

#24: Cluster & Job Health Dashboard

Purpose: Real-time view of job latency, failure rate, utilization
Complexity: Low-Medium
Status: ✅ Complete (MVP)
Dependencies: #22, #23

Panels:

  • Jobs/sec (last 5 minutes)
  • Failure rate (%)
  • P50/P95/P99 scheduling latency
  • GPU utilization by cluster
  • Retry rate

#25: RBAC + Tenant Isolation

Purpose: Namespace/tenant-level quota and policy enforcement
Complexity: Medium
Status: ⏳ Planned (Phase 2)
Dependencies: #3

Design:

Tenant A:
  - Max GPUs: 10
  - Max jobs: 100
  - Priority: NORMAL
  
Tenant B:
  - Max GPUs: 50
  - Max jobs: 500
  - Priority: HIGH
  
Enforce quotas at submission time

#26: Audit Logging & Policy Validation

Purpose: All job/API actions logged and validated centrally
Complexity: Medium
Status: ⏳ Planned (Phase 3)
Dependencies: #12

Design:

Audit log entry:
{
  "timestamp": "2025-01-15T10:30:00Z",
  "action": "SUBMIT_JOB",
  "user": "alice@nyu.edu",
  "job_id": "abc-123",
  "cluster": "us-west-1",
  "status": "SUCCESS"
}

Polaris Features

Polaris is the observability platform purpose-built for Ares. It extends Ares' basic metrics (#22-24) with advanced SLA tracking, anomaly detection, and operational insights.


#22 (Polaris): Global Metrics Pipeline

Status: ✅ Complete (basic), 🚧 Enhanced version in progress
Dependencies: Ares #22

Polaris Enhancements:

  • Federated Prometheus across all clusters
  • Long-term storage (Thanos/Cortex)
  • Cross-cluster metric aggregation
  • Custom SLA metrics

Design:

┌──────────┐   ┌──────────┐   ┌──────────┐
│Cluster 1 │   │Cluster 2 │   │Cluster 3 │
│Prometheus│   │Prometheus│   │Prometheus│
└─────┬────┘   └─────┬────┘   └─────┬────┘
      │              │              │
      └──────────────┼──────────────┘
                     ↓
            ┌────────────────┐
            │ Polaris Global │
            │  Aggregator    │
            └────────┬───────┘
                     ↓
            ┌────────────────┐
            │ Thanos Storage │
            │  (Long-term)   │
            └────────────────┘

Metrics:

  • Standard Ares metrics (jobs, latency, GPU utilization)
  • NEW: Cross-cluster correlation
  • NEW: SLA compliance rate
  • NEW: Cost per job (compute time × GPU cost)

#23 (Polaris): Unified Dashboard & Tracing

Status: ✅ Complete (basic), 🚧 Enhanced version in progress
Dependencies: Ares #22, #23

Polaris Enhancements:

  • Distributed tracing across clusters (Jaeger/Tempo)
  • End-to-end job latency visualization
  • Anomaly detection (ML-based)
  • Cost dashboards

Example Trace:

Job abc-123 end-to-end latency: 145ms

Span 1: Client submit          → 5ms
Span 2: Global scheduler route → 10ms
Span 3: Cluster-1 queue        → 20ms
Span 4: GPU placement scoring  → 15ms
Span 5: Worker lease acquire   → 50ms
Span 6: Job execution          → 40ms
Span 7: Result commit          → 5ms

#24 (Polaris): Cluster & Job Health Dashboard

Status: ✅ Complete (basic), 🚧 Enhanced version in progress
Dependencies: Ares #22-24

Polaris Enhancements:

  • SLA Compliance Tracking

    • Jobs meeting SLA deadline (%)
    • P95/P99 latency vs SLA target
    • SLA violations by cluster
  • Anomaly Detection

    • Sudden failure rate spike (alert)
    • GPU utilization drop (alert)
    • Scheduling latency outliers
  • Predictive Insights

    • "Cluster-2 will hit capacity in 2 hours"
    • "Job queue backlog growing, scale up?"

Dashboard Panels:

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ SLA Compliance (Last 24h)                   │
│ ███████████████████████░░░░ 92% (target: 95%)│
└─────────────────────────────────────────────┘

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Cluster Health Heatmap                      │
│ Cluster-1: ████████████████ 95% healthy     │
│ Cluster-2: ██████████░░░░░░ 60% healthy ⚠️  │
│ Cluster-3: ████████████████ 100% healthy ✅ │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────┘

#26 (Polaris): Audit Logging & Policy Validation

Status: ⏳ Planned (Phase 3)
Dependencies: Ares #12, #26

Polaris Enhancements:

  • Centralized audit log aggregation
  • Policy violation detection
  • Security event correlation
  • Compliance reporting

Example Policy:

policy:
  name: "GPU usage quota"
  rule: "tenant.gpu_hours < tenant.quota"
  action: "REJECT_JOB"
  alert: "Email admin + Slack #alerts"

Implementation Roadmap

Phase 1: MVP (Nov 2 - Dec 8, 2025) ✅ 27% Complete

Completed Features (7):

  • #3: Fair Resource Allocation
  • #4: Topology-Aware Scheduling (basic)
  • #5: Priority & Preemption
  • #6: Exactly-Once Job Execution
  • #13: GPU-Aware Scheduling (basic)
  • #17: Job Lifecycle Management
  • #21: Backoff & Retry Policy

In Progress (2):

  • #22: Global Metrics Pipeline (basic)
  • #23: Unified Dashboard (basic)

Timeline: 36 days, sustainable pace


Phase 2: Core Features (Jan - Feb 2026) → 54% Complete

Features to Add (7):

  • #1: Multi-Cluster Scheduling (basic)
  • #7: Global Control Plane
  • #8: Cluster Autonomy
  • #14: NUMA Awareness
  • #16: Heterogeneous Hardware
  • #18: Idempotent Job Submission
  • #25: RBAC + Tenant Isolation

Focus: Production-grade reliability + observability

Timeline: 8 weeks while interviewing


Phase 3: Advanced Features (Mar - June 2026) → 85% Complete

Features to Add (9):

  • #2: Multi-Region Federation
  • #9: Dynamic Cluster Registration
  • #10: Health & Heartbeat Propagation
  • #11: Eventual Consistency
  • #12: API Gateway
  • #15: Network Bandwidth Awareness
  • #20: Checkpointing & Recovery
  • #24: Enhanced Polaris Dashboard
  • #26: Audit Logging

Focus: Scale, federation, advanced ops

Timeline: 4 months while working at job


Phase 4: Full Vision (July - Dec 2026) → 100% Complete

Polish & Community:

  • Documentation improvements
  • Performance optimization
  • Community contributions
  • Conference talks
  • Production deployments

Timeline: 6 months


Feature Dependencies

Dependency Graph

#17 (Job Lifecycle) ─────────┬──→ #5 (Priority)
                             │
                             └──→ #21 (Retry Policy)
                                   │
                                   └──→ #20 (Checkpointing)

#18 (Idempotency) ───┐
#19 (Leasing) ───────┼──→ #6 (Exactly-Once)
                     │
                     
#13 (GPU-Aware) ─────┼──→ #4 (Topology-Aware)
                     │         │
                     │         └──→ #15 (Network Awareness)
                     │
                     └──→ #14 (NUMA Awareness)
                     
                     └──→ #16 (Heterogeneous)

#7 (Global Plane) ───┬──→ #1 (Multi-Cluster)
                     │         │
                     │         └──→ #2 (Multi-Region)
                     │
                     ├──→ #8 (Autonomy)
                     │
                     ├──→ #9 (Dynamic Registration)
                     │
                     ├──→ #10 (Heartbeat)
                     │
                     ├──→ #11 (Consistency)
                     │
                     └──→ #12 (API Gateway)

#22 (Metrics) ───────┬──→ #23 (Dashboard)
                     │
                     └──→ #24 (Health Dashboard)

#3 (Fairness) ───────┼──→ #25 (RBAC)

#12 (API Gateway) ───┼──→ #26 (Audit Logging)

Critical Path

To reach Multi-Cluster (#1):
  Requires: #7 (Global Control Plane)
  
To reach Multi-Region (#2):
  Requires: #1, #7, #8, #9
  
To reach Exactly-Once (#6):
  Requires: #18, #19
  
To reach Full Production:
  Requires: All Phase 2 features + observability

Summary

Total Features: 26 (22 Ares + 4 Polaris)
Completed: 7 (27%)
Current Focus: Multi-cluster + observability (Week 4)
Next Milestone: 14 features by Feb 2026 (54%)
Full Vision: 26 features by Dec 2026 (100%)

This feature matrix serves as both:

  1. Technical specification for implementation
  2. Roadmap for development phases
  3. Portfolio artifact demonstrating distributed systems depth

Each feature is designed to showcase specific distributed systems patterns (consensus, leasing, topology awareness, SLA enforcement) at L4/L5 engineering level.


Last Updated: December 2025
Maintained By: Sathya Balasubramani (@BITS08SATHYA)