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+# Solana Cluster Manager
+
+Tooling to manage private clusters of Solana nodes.
+
+## Architecture
+
+### Snapshot management
+
+**[Twitter 🧵](https://twitter.com/terorie_dev)**
+
+Snapshot management tooling enables efficient peer-to-peer transfers of accounts database archives.
+
+![Snapshot Fetch](./docs/snapshots.png)
+
+**Scraping** (Flow A)
+
+Snapshot metadata collection runs periodically similarly to Prometheus scraping.
+
+Each cluster-aware node runs a lightweight `solana-cluster sidecar` agent providing telemetry about its snapshots.
+
+The `solana-cluster tracker` then connects to all sidecars to assemble a complete list of snapshot metadata.
+The tracker is stateless so it can be replicated.
+Service discovery is available through HTTP and JSON files. Consul SD support is planned.
+
+Side note: Snapshot sources are configurable in stock Solana software but only via static lists.
+This does not scale well with large fleets because each cluster change requires updating the lists of all nodes.
+
+**Downloading** (Flow B)
+
+When a Solana node needs to fetch a snapshot remotely, the tracker helps it find the best snapshot source.
+Nodes will download snapshots directly from the sidecars of other nodes.
+
+### TPU & TVU
+
+Not yet ready for release. 🚜
+
+## Motivation
+
+When Solana validators first start, they have to retrieve and validate hundreds of gigabytes of state data from a remote node.
+During normal operation, validators stream at least 500 Mbps of traffic in either direction.
+
+For Solana infra operators that manage more than node (not to mention hundreds), this cost currently scales linearly as well.
+It shouldn't have to though.
+
+Co-located Solana validators that are controlled by the same entity should also behave as one.
+Bandwidth cost is especially asymmetric:
+10 Gbps connectivity is also cheap and abundant locally within data centers
+but persistent 1 Gbps streams between globally dispersed validator gets expensive quickly.
+
+Blockdaemon manages one of the largest validator and RPC infrastructure deployments to date, backed by a custom peer-to-peer backbone.
+This repository shares our tools for performance and sustainability (network & SSD wear) improvements.