We have developed a highly scalable application, called Shoal, for tracking and utilizing a distributed set of HTTP web caches. Squid servers advertise their existence to the Shoal server via AMQP messaging by running Shoal Agent. The Shoal server provides a simple REST interface that allows clients to determine their closest Squid cache. Our goal is to dynamically instantiate Squid caches on IaaS clouds in response to client demand. Shoal provides the VMs on IaaS clouds with the location of the nearest dynamically instantiated Squid Cache. In this paper, we describe the design and performance of Shoal.
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