CentOS - Feb 2020 - [Infra announce] : Speeding-up yum updates from inside AWS/EC2

Tomorrow, I intend to push a change to mirrorlist.centos.org nodes that
will have a (good) impact to CentOS EC2 instances running from AWS network.

Thanks to AWS, sponsoring the required backend infra for this to happen,
our mirrorlist nodes will redirect yum/dnf operations internally in the
EC2/AWS network.

What does that mean for you ?
- faster updates (due to Cloudfront caching, and so most of the recent
packages/rpms being kept in cache in each region)
- less data transfer costs (due to such updates being served from inside
EC2 network[s] and so not leaving EC2 infrastructure)

How does it work ?
- When your CentOS EC2 instance hits mirrorlist.centos.org, it's
identified as coming from EC2 network, thanks to
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws-ip-ranges.html, loaded
into our mirrorlist code
- You'll be redirected to CloudFront, itself using a dedicated origin to
which we automatically push all updates directly
  - if you're the first one asking for that update/rpm, Edge (cache
server in that region) will retrieve it and will cache it while also
serving it to you
  - if someone requested same rpm that you're asking for, it will be
directly served from cache, so at "local" speed (we saw some rpm being
downloaded on second attempt at ~80MB/s)

We already tested with several volunteers in our staging environment
that it was working fine, and so far so good.

We have no real estimate about the number of CentOS EC2 instances in all
regions, so we plan on doing a canary-style deployment, so Ansible
switching our mirrorlist code/role one-by-one and observe the cloudfront
statistics.

Should you encounter any issue, feel free to reply to this thread and/or
#centos-devel on irc.freenode.net

-- 
Fabian Arrotin
The CentOS Project | https://www.centos.org
gpg key: 17F3B7A1 | twitter: @arrfab

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