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Comment on Amazon Cloud Traffic Is Suffocating Fedora's Mirrors

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Something irks me about volunteers spending real money to support all the OSS freeloading businesses. I'm talking about companies with a market cap in the $Billions. Almost none of them can be bothered to kick back even a modicum of financial support to the authors of the software that runs their business, and to add insult to injury, they in fact soak the members of community who distribute the binaries for their bandwidth.

I wonder why Amazon did not create their own mirror. They would sync with Fedora mirrors once. All aws traffic can then go to their own mirrors.

Isn't that sensible thing to do?

AWS CodeArtifact doesn’t support RPM. Have your TAM +1 the PFR for RPM support. Then all those AWS customers running AL2 or RHEL 8 can use a secure, local-to-the-VPC mirror.

So, let's say you set up an EL7 system with stock everything, and then enable epel with dnf install epel-release or equivalent.

You now get the stock epel mirror listing, not a custom package Amazon rewrote, and they'd need to add a custom mirror that provides an override for that package to make it work that way.

So I would _guess_ one or more large companies migrated a bunch of things onto cloud hosted EL7-based system after EOL meant god help you finding new hardware support.

(I would also guess either EPEL doesn't have a mirror on Amazon or it should have auto-picked it, or the auto-picker is bad, and either way, Amazon will probably go "oh our bad", since I believe they host local mirrors of things anyway...)

How about just support community distributions? ...and no, Fedora is non of them.

Just stop support brand's and corporation's if you don't get paid?

Does Redhat pay for fedora's infra? Genuine question and I'm not saying it's better either. It's just that it would be weird for fedora to operate on volunteer/donated infra when it's quite important to red hat, considering it's the "upstream" (not sure if that's the correct term here) of RHEL

From TFA:

The massive uptick in Fedora/EPEL activity puts additional pressure on Fedora web proxies for mirror data and then the mirrors themselves that tend to be volunteer run. Much of this new traffic is coming from the Amazon/AWS cloud.

Ah I read the article but I wasn't sure what they meant by volunteer (for example individuals only or corporate too) run in this context. Your interpretation makes sense though!

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