[Qemu-devel] Moving release tarballs to a CDN

[Stefan Hajnoczi]

Hi Mike and Jeff,
qemu.org's bandwidth usage is dominated by release tarball downloads.
This puts qemu.org bandwidth usage in the 2+ TB/month range.

Many hosting providers do not offer this much bandwidth as part of a
basic package that would otherwise fit qemu.org's requirements.

Several people have suggested putting release tarballs on a mirror or
CDN to offload the bandwidth usage.  Jeff Cody and I looked at using
GitHub's "releases" feature to host release tarballs.

The following changes would be necessary:

1. Add qemu.org URL redirection to GitHub:
https://download.qemu.org/qemu-(\d+.\d+.\d+).tar.xz ->
https://github.com/qemu/qemu/releases/download/v\1/qemu-\1.tar.xz

2. Modify release script to immediately push to GitHub and then upload
tar.xz via API:
https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/releases/#upload-a-release-asset

3. Continue using https://download.qemu.org/qemu-\d+.\d+.\d+.tar.xz
URL for download links.

This way future QEMU releases would be hosted on GitHub with nice
qemu.org download links.  The signature file stays hosted on qemu.org
so it's possible to validate that the tarball has not been tampered
with.

How does this sound?

Stefan