Amazon Cloud Traffic Is Suffocating Fedora's Mirrors

A massive uptick in traffic to Fedora's package mirrors is causing problems for the Linux distribution. Some five million additional systems have started putting additional strain on Fedora's mirror resources since March and appear to be coming from Amazon's cloud.

Stephen Smoogen of Red Hat wrote a blog post today around 5+ million more EPEL-7 systems beginning in March. Fedora hosts the packaging mirrors for Extra Packages For Enterprise Linux (EPEL) to augment the package selection available on RHEL, CentOS, Amazon Linux, etc. The past three months now there has been a 5+ million surge in Fedora/EPEL traffic and it's placed a strain on the systems. It's about doubling the number of unique IPs connecting to the mirror system.

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.

In today's blog post, Smoogen describes it as "I am not sure what changed in Amazon in March, but it has had a tremendous impact on parts of Fedora Infrastructure and the volunteer mirror systems which use it." With some extra publicity on the situation, hopefully whatever the underlying cause of the change in traffic pattern will hopefully be better handled now by Amazon.