Collabora Online Controller
Smart Savings, Seamless Redundancy,
More Collabora, Less Hassle
What is the Collabora Online Controller?
Our new Collabora Online Controller (COOL Controller), is an exciting addition to Collabora Online, which will streamline and bring significant savings to large deployments, maximising server resource usage and efficiency, minimising running costs, and simplifying the real-time monitoring of your Collabora Online document editing solution.
What will it do?
1. Improve scaling and load distribution
2. Cost-efficient server usage
3. Quick and smooth server scaling
4. Perfect for large deployments
Improved Scaling and Load Distribution
We are excited about the new COOL Controller for a number of reasons, but particularly for how it will improve scaling and load distribution. The new COOL Controller is designed to quickly and smoothly scale up server availability when needed, and crucially scale back down usage when demand is low. This all happens whilst strategically balancing the migration of documents across all pods1.
The controller continuously monitors memory utilisation of pods, with a target utilisation percentage defined by administrators. If a pod’s memory utilisation surpasses the target threshold, it is marked as overloaded. The controller initiates document migration from overloaded pods to less loaded pods, ensuring an even distribution of resources and requests. Additional pods can be opened to share the load if required. Actively migrating documents from overloaded to less loaded pods ensures a balanced distribution of requests and resources. This optimisation results in an enhanced user experience and smoother collaborative editing.
In the same way, if resources are under-utilised, the controller will mark underused pods, and seek to migrate documents, reducing the overall resource usage. This load scaling aims to bring significant cost and resource savings to large deployments that are underutilised at night, or weekends for example, but that require high availability during peak times.
1. Pods are the smallest deployable units of computing that you can create and manage in Kubernetes. https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/pods/nce.
Scaling down
Here the system merges and closes additional pods to reduce resource usage.
Scaling up
Controller Management
Dashboard
In addition to this core functionality, the COOL Controller also provides a cluster overview page that offers a central view of the deployment. Administrators can access individual pod admin consoles directly from this page, simplifying the management and monitoring of Collabora Online deployments.
Overall, the Collabora Online Controller significantly enhances the deployment and management of Collabora Online. It brings a smooth and efficient collaborative editing experience for users, and economical resource usage to large deployments, whilst maintaining session consistency.
