On 23/03/17 09:32, Michael Vermaes wrote:
I think there is still some benefit to maintaining a presence on Atlas if possible, as it is where Vagrant users are likely to search for CentOS boxes first. But hosting the metadata on the CentOS infrastructure makes a lot of sense for the reasons you mentioned. I guess you could maybe leave a final release in Atlas pointing people to the new location when it's available.
It would be great if Atlas would also allow redirects for metadata, not just the boxes - not sure if that's possible. I'm also not sure how many users search directly on Atlas for official images released by CentOS, instead of Google or our own website. If we decide to move away from Atlas, we should definitely release a last image there, with the description pointing people to the new location (ideally, a web page dedicated to our Vagrant images).
By the way, from what I can understand from the commit history [1], it looks like the Bento metadata was added for a similar reason, to allow them to consider standing up their own metadata server in place of Atlas.
Thanks, I didn't know that. But I realized another benefit to hosting our own metadata, besides checksums: we could also get statistics on how many active users we have, on which host OSes, since Vagrant will download the metadata to check if a new image has been released (at least when a box is booted).
Laurențiu