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It would be lovely to see Bittorrent in this space. Distributing an identical blob to N machines is squarely within its wheelhouse. All those CI machines would

by teeray 4y ago

It would be lovely to see Bittorrent in this space. Distributing an identical blob to N machines is squarely within its wheelhouse. All those CI machines would make wonderful seeders too.

danmcs 4y ago
Uber Engineering open-sourced Kraken [1], their peer-to-peer docker registry. I remember it originally using the BitTorrent protocol but in their readme they now say it is "based on BitTorrent" due to different tradeoffs they needed to make. As far as I know there aren't any projects doing peer-to-peer distribution of container images to servers, probably because it's useful to be able to use a stock docker daemon on your server. The Kraken page references Dragonfly [2] but I haven't grokked it yet, it might be that. It has seemed strange to me that the docker daemon I run on a host is not also a registry, if I want to enable that feature. It's also possible that in practice you'd want your CI nodes optimized for compute because they're doing a lot of work, your registry hosts for bandwidth, and your servers again for compute, and having one daemon to rule them all seems elegant but is actually overgeneralized, and specialization is better. 1 https://github.com/uber/kraken https://github.com/uber/kraken 2 https://d7y.io/ https://d7y.io/
scary-size 4y ago
The gaming industry has been using peer to peer downloads for a long time AFAIK. Unsure if they still do, pretty sure the Battle.net client did it.
- smileybarry 4y ago
  It was used in the WoW downloader pre-Battle.NET, they've moved off that and switched to CDNs (mostly Akamai IIRC) & dynamic patching, i.e.: Battle.NET computes differences and gets a diff. Steam never used P2P downloading but they've had deals with ISPs and communities really early and made their own "CDN" full of caching servers everywhere, so if you waited a few hours to update, it might make it to your local server in time. Now I think they're on Akamai as well.
  - scary-size 4y ago
    Oh, right, there was the WoW launcher before battle.net. I think I have another game in mind which used this, but I can’t really remember. Would love to get more insights on the economics of this (p2p vs. cdn).
    - smileybarry 4y ago
      WoW popularized it and a lot of “WoW killer” MMOs had P2P, but I never saw it “work” to be honest.

by teeray 4y ago

It would be lovely to see Bittorrent in this space. Distributing an identical blob to N machines is squarely within its wheelhouse. All those CI machines would make wonderful seeders too.

danmcs 4y ago

Uber Engineering open-sourced Kraken [1], their peer-to-peer docker registry. I remember it originally using the BitTorrent protocol but in their readme they now say it is "based on BitTorrent" due to different tradeoffs they needed to make. As far as I know there aren't any projects doing peer-to-peer distribution of container images to servers, probably because it's useful to be able to use a stock docker daemon on your server. The Kraken page references Dragonfly [2] but I haven't grokked it yet, it might be that. It has seemed strange to me that the docker daemon I run on a host is not also a registry, if I want to enable that feature. It's also possible that in practice you'd want your CI nodes optimized for compute because they're doing a lot of work, your registry hosts for bandwidth, and your servers again for compute, and having one daemon to rule them all seems elegant but is actually overgeneralized, and specialization is better. 1 https://github.com/uber/kraken https://github.com/uber/kraken 2 https://d7y.io/ https://d7y.io/

scary-size 4y ago

The gaming industry has been using peer to peer downloads for a long time AFAIK. Unsure if they still do, pretty sure the Battle.net client did it.

smileybarry 4y ago
It was used in the WoW downloader pre-Battle.NET, they've moved off that and switched to CDNs (mostly Akamai IIRC) & dynamic patching, i.e.: Battle.NET computes differences and gets a diff. Steam never used P2P downloading but they've had deals with ISPs and communities really early and made their own "CDN" full of caching servers everywhere, so if you waited a few hours to update, it might make it to your local server in time. Now I think they're on Akamai as well.
- scary-size 4y ago
  Oh, right, there was the WoW launcher before battle.net. I think I have another game in mind which used this, but I can’t really remember. Would love to get more insights on the economics of this (p2p vs. cdn).
  - smileybarry 4y ago
    WoW popularized it and a lot of “WoW killer” MMOs had P2P, but I never saw it “work” to be honest.