[mirror-admin] mirroring containers?

[Matthew Miller]

On Mon, Nov 07, 2016 at 11:29:32AM -0500, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> I think it is hard to answer that question without a couple of things:
> 1) How much disk space are you looking at?

As a rough estimate, less than a gigabyte to start with, but growing
fairly rapidly. I think "as big as traditional Fedora is now in three
years" is probably realistic -- for the optimistic/successful end of
the spectrum.

> 2) How many files in that disk space are you looking at?

There are, excitingly, two opposite answers for this. For OCI/Docker
containers, an order of magnitude or so smaller than an RPM tree, since
each image is an aggregate. For ostree, though, it's currently a lot of
small files, since each RPM is exploded and tracked separately.

> 3) How much churn and what kind of churn is it going to be? If the
> file names stay the same but the contents change then it could be
> possible to save via rsync delta patching but if it is completely
> different files then its pure downloads each time.

The goal is to have less churn than we have with Fedora updates now;
except for critical/important security updates, each container will be
released in an updated batch every two weeks (assuming that any updates
even apply to that container). We may also separate out "stable",
"devel", and "rawhide/nightly" — and we could do that in a
mirror-friendly way.

> 4) How do mirrors advertise this to customers?

Two ways. First, system tools would use mirrormanager in a way similar
to what yum/dnf do now. Second, we *probably* will have a web-based
interface of some sort, although that's TBD.

-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader

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