MicroMirror CDN: Mirroring FOSS as a Managed Appliance
Volunteers mirroring Linux Distros and Free Software projects is the only way that projects are able to scale without being crushed by the bandwidth bills necessary to make their software available at large. The old guard of mirrors are greying, so new providers of bandwidth and server admins need to step up to fill their shoes. The MicroMirror project is one approach to this by finding the most popular projects consuming the most bandwidth on mirrors and spreading that load across dozens of new, smaller, cheaper, mirror servers across the globe.
Kenneth Finnegan and John Hawley first started collaborating on Linux mirroring in January 2022 by standing up mirror.fcix.net as a “traditional” style Linux/free software mirror. After pulling in a 50TB working set of projects and looking at the statistics, they realized that the majority of the network traffic was coming from a small fraction of the most popular projects. Kenneth came up with the insane challenge of trying to build an entire “MicroMirror” server for less than the cost of a single high capacity hard drive used in mirror.fcix.net. Designed to serve only the hottest working set of projects, and offered to ISPs as a managed appliance, these MicroMirror servers proved wildly popular and successful in their mission.
Presenters
Kenneth Finnegan
Originally an Electrical Engineer, Kenneth fell into Internet infrastructure and network engineering through a long series of events involving the phrase “hold my beer,” including building his own Autonomous System (AS7034), building a global anycast DNS server (NS-global.zone), building the Fremont Cabal Internet Exchange in Fremont, California, and ultimately working in the Technical Assistance Center for Arista Networks.