[SAC] CDN for osgeo4w

Regina Obe lr at pcorp.us
Fri Jan 17 16:48:28 PST 2020


Matthias,

Which mirror are you referring to -- I see 4 listed on the OSGeo4W download

Both download.osgeo.org and ftp.osuosl.org  are hosted on OSUOSL network but the ftp .osuosl.org part is on their high bandwidth redundant network so should be much faster than the download.osgeo.org.

The download.osgeo.org is where files are initially put so would always be guaranteed to have the newest.

Regarding CDN vs. other forms of load balancing.  We have discussed it but haven't setup a feature so the user experience is just one url as you describe.

That's one of the things I hope we'll achieve this year.

As to which CDNs we use or we may use I'm not sure where opinions land on that.  
I think many people feel that whatever resources we use from a company or other organization, the motives of that other org should be aligned with ours and their success equally should be aligned with our success.
Some people don't care about motives and think we should just seek the fastest best resources to achieve our goals of GIS  open source adoption.

That said University's like OSUOSL are a good fit.

Things get a bit fuzzy when dealing with other companies

Are we more of a marketing tick in their marketing objectives or do they have more concrete investments in our success.

For companies that invest heavily in development of OSGeo software, I think most agree that they've aligned their success with ours so no qualms about using resources offered by them.

That said -- I too would  like to hear others opinions on the topic.

Thanks,
Regina

-----Original Message-----
From: Sac [mailto:sac-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Matthias Kuhn
Sent: Friday, January 17, 2020 3:39 PM
To: Sac at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: [SAC] CDN for osgeo4w

Hi,

I have recently been using osgeo4w here and there and noticed that download speed is not that fast (around 500 KB/s here). I have been advised that using the listed mirrors is faster and that's indeed the case, which is very good. However, I think this does not completely solve the issue. 1. it is unclear if all repositories listed there do serve the same content or have company specific additions / purpose and 2. even if this is the case and communicated transparently, there is no clear strategy on picking the best mirror.

So I was wondering if it would be possible to use a CDN for this purpose or if there are particular reasons not to implement such a system. As far as I know qgis.org is provided through cloudflare, not sure about other osgeo resources.

I have seen that keycdn [1] offers free services for open source projects, but maybe there are other services already in place.

I am keen to hear opinions on this topic. I think for the average end user it would be a huge benefit to only have to focus on the choice *what to download* and having some smart technology take care of the *where from*.

If the idea is generally well received, I'd be happy to write a mail to KeyCDN or help if possible.

Best regards

Matthias

[1] https://www.keycdn.com/open-source-cdn

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