Bonum Certa Men Certa

It Looks Like Red Hat's (IBM) Fedora Project May be 'Outsourced' to Amazon's Datacentres

Amazon datacentres in Ashburn
Amazon datacentres in Ashburn (source: Wikileaks)



Summary: In "seeking a more modern and cost effective location" for Fedora Infrastructure it seems to have been decided, privately, that Amazon (AWS) would be the new home of this project; but there's sufficient obfuscation surrounding the matter and many people seem to be totally unaware

OVERNIGHT we've spent several hours researching this and we also asked some Fedora people, who don't seem to know exactly what's going on. Surely some people higher up the corporate chain have a better and clearer idea, but they're not likely to speak about it because IBM pays their salary and there's fear of further layoffs. A lot of the finer details will be available in IRC logs (frustratingly enough, almost all the coding/code hosting was outsourced to Microsoft), but the gist of it all is this: while examining about a dozen services of the Fedora Project we've occasionally stumbled upon Amazon addresses. And then there's this:



dig copr.fedorainfracloud.org



; <<>> DiG 9.11.5-P4-5.1+deb10u1-Debian <<>> copr.fedorainfracloud.org ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 34423 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION: ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 512 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;copr.fedorainfracloud.org. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION: copr.fedorainfracloud.org. 300 IN CNAME copr-fe.aws.fedoraproject.org. copr-fe.aws.fedoraproject.org. 939 IN A 3.81.0.123


This probably merits a little bit of context. A few hours ago Fedora Infrastructure had another very major OpenShift failure (not the first such incident over the past few days). Well, it wasn't an issue until lately...

This so-called 'cloud computing' software is Red Hat's brand (with GUIs and everything) of something that's otherwise widely available as Free software but harder to use.

"Fedora Infrastructure Status: Major service disruption," said the notice, reading out the extent of the impact: "New status major: issues with openshift cluster for services: Ipsilon, Badges, Blockerbugs, Package Updates Manager, Fedora Infrastructure Cloud, COPR Build System, Documentation website, Fedora elections, Account System, Fedora Messaging Bus, Fedora Calendar, Fedora pastebin service, The Koji Buildsystem, Koschei Continuous Integration, Kerberos, Mailing Lists, Module Build Service, Mirror List, Mirror Manager, Fedora Packages App, Pagure, Fedora People, Package maintainers git repositories, Fedora Container Registry, ABRT Server, Fedora websites, Fedora Wiki, Zodbot IRC bot"

"...while examining about a dozen services of the Fedora Project we've occasionally stumbled upon Amazon addresses."And later on it said "New status good: Everything seems to be working."

"We are now operating from the new datacentre and are bringing back capacity as time allows. The known issues are documented here in our wiki," it adds. If one goes to the corresponding status page for pertinent services ("Fedora Project Datacentre Move") it is linking to this wiki page, which in turn says: "This is a page to track known issues after the Fedora Infrastructure Datacenter move in 2020 from phx2 to iad2 and rdu2."

Those are not descriptive names, as there's not even a domain name/suffix. We tried tracing back the IP addresses of these services to identity where at least some these services were being moved to. "I think it's more Red Hat management pressure to rely on Github and Google," Ryan said, but it seems to be related to neither. "You know," Ryan continued, "the infrastructure self-hosting was VERY reliable for many years before that." He mentioned "GMail, Google Drive, calendar stuff" as examples, citing the anonymous post that said about Jim Whitehurst: "He didn't use our products (used a Mac, along with other members of the executive management team), allowed RH to dump open source solutions for our own business to move things to Google's services (which is a huge message to our very clients of "we don't value or trust open source, so why should you?")"

"A few hours ago Fedora Infrastructure had another very major OpenShift failure (not the first such incident over the past few days)."The migration pages are edited mostly by Kevin Fenzi (IBM/Red Hat), who wrote about it less than a year ago in the devel-announce mailing list. No replies to it as of this date.

Is Copr on AWS now? Seems so. If the new DC of Fedora is Amazon-owned and Amazon-controlled, there may be something to conclude. Depending on one's opinion regarding Amazon and AWS, which turns Free/libre things into proprietary.

This message from last year says the hosting of various services is moving to the city/area in VA where AWS has many datacentres that already route some Fedora traffic. While we don't know for sure what's going on, as we need to better understand what plans are made in the boardroom (behind closed doors), it seems likely there's a move to Amazon.

Four years ago The Atlantic published "Where Are Amazon's Data Centers?" and it took note of Ashburn and Sterling. About a year later Wikileaks revealed that both places have lots of datacentres in them, mostly Ashburn (shown above is our screenshot of these).

Going back to Kevin, less than a year ago he wrote: "Fedora Infrastructure currently has the majority of its hardware in a datacenter in Arizona, USA. Red Hat leases this space for use by a number of teams, including Fedora."

"This message from last year says the hosting of various services is moving to the city/area in VA where AWS has many datacentres that already route some Fedora traffic."We can confirm, based on lots of checks, that many services still link to that datacentre.

"However," Kevin continued, "they've been seeking a more modern and cost effective location for some time and have decided on one: So, we will be migrating to a new datacenter located in Ashburn, Virginia in 2020."

Oh, Ashburn. Where Amazon has a densely-distributed cluster of datacentres.

Is Red Hat moving to 'the cloud' and, if so, why not its own? Does IBM feel like it needs to outsource that to a competitor/partner?

The details on this are still not certain and I could not get anybody from Fedora (in IRC) to confirm or deny. Quite frankly, many of them may not be aware.

Recent Techrights' Posts

[Video] To Combat Efforts to Cancel or Kill the Career (and Reputation) of the People Who Made GNU/Linux We Must Rally the Community
nobody speaks better for projects and for licences than their own founders
Electronic Frontier Foundation Incorporated is Run by/for Corporations Now (Members' Money is Less Than a Quarter of the Money EFF Receives)
Facebook bribes
 
Links 10/12/2023: Inflation Woes, Tensions With China
Links for the day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, December 09, 2023
IRC logs for Saturday, December 09, 2023
Links 09/12/2023: Dictator's Nomination in Russia
Links for the day
The EFF Should Know Better, But It Is Promoting Mass Surveillance by Facebook (an Endorsement of Lies)
What is going on at the EFF?
Feedback Desired
Feedback can be sent by E-mail
A Message in Support of Richard Stallman, Condemning Those Who Misportray Him
message about Richard Stallman (RMS)
Links 09/12/2023: Many 'Open'AI Employees Strongly Dislike Microsoft, Many Impending Strikes
Links for the day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, December 08, 2023
IRC logs for Friday, December 08, 2023
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news
Open Source Initiative (OSI) is Microsoft, It Presents Microsoft-Controlled Projects Like They're Everything That Exists in the World
They're not assessing the real data, they keep track only of projects foolish enough to choose slavery under Microsoft
Links 08/12/2023: Cyber Resilience Act in EU and Denmark Embracing 'Blasphemy Law'
Links for the day
Linus Torvalds Cannot Easily 'Offend' Companies Anymore, But Weeks Ago He Explained Why (Linux Support and Hardware Documentation Has Significantly Improved)
new clip
Links 08/12/2023: Tidal and Simplilearn Layoffs
Links for the day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, December 07, 2023
IRC logs for Thursday, December 07, 2023
[Video] The Media Facilitates Microsoft's Abuse, Bribes, and Growing Threats to National Security
The failure of the media to properly and independently explain what's happening will continue to doom the media
[Video] The Next Ten Years of Techrights in a World With Changing Threats and Technological Landscapes (or Trends That Are Buzzwords/Cargo Cults)
The video of today talks about the site's (and capsule's plan) for the future
Wikipedia is Vandalism, Brought to You by Microsoft and Bill Gates
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer