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Dragonfly, an Open-Source P2P-Based Image and File Distribution System (d7y.io)
86 points by sytse on April 11, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 16 comments



I can't take software serious that doesn't compare itself to equal contenders.

"We are a P2P-Based file distribution system" here is how we compare to wget. This looks to me like any other p2p system with extra steps (docker your own server, docker your client?, docker nginx as well!)

Yeah no thanks if I want to share stuff over p2p I will use a torrent and I don't trust software that doesn't even acknowledge other products like retroshare, gnunet or one of the other dozens of solutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file-sharing_app...

PS why use docker anyway when your application is written in go?


I agree a more prominently placed comparison with other P2P applications would be helpful.

BTW There is a comparison with Bit-Torrent in the FAQ https://github.com/dragonflyoss/Dragonfly/blob/master/FAQ.md...


"At Alibaba, every month Dragonfly is invoked two billion times and distributes 3.4PB of data. Dragonfly has become one of the most important pieces of infrastructure at Alibaba."

For those that are confused, this is a lot more descriptive:

https://d7y.io/en-us/docs/overview/what_is_dragonfly.html


Sounds similar to Uber's Kraken

https://github.com/uber/kraken


One difference is governance. Dragonfly is a CNCF project with open governance.


Clearly this project isn't presented well as most comments don't seem to understand that the primary use case of this tool is to use P2P technology to make "docker pull" more efficient.


Another website with light grey text on a white background. Come on people half the world can’t read this low contrast crap.


Unfortunate name.

There's a large open source project named this way already, and it's an operating system.


It is even worse than that. This has connections to both Google (Go, CNCF) and China (Alibaba). There is already something called Dragonfly in that intersection:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)


Yes, unfortunate naming.

https://www.dragonflybsd.org


I can’t tell who the primary user for this may be.

Is it meant to replace traditional CDNs outright?


This is more like Facebook's use of Chihaya torrent tracker within Tupperware.

For very large web companies like this, when they push a new app update, the container needs to be distributed to hundreds of thousands of internal servers. Using P2P technology is just common sense to reduce load on the central artefact repository.


reminds me of a modern version of twitter's murder project (https://github.com/lg/murder), ie Torrent large file (ala docker) distribution. Dragonfly is also a cncf incubation project recently, https://www.cncf.io/blog/2020/04/09/toc-votes-to-move-dragon...


similar to Uber's Kraken https://github.com/uber/kraken

which to choose? Which is better?


Dragonfly very good!


>p2p

> alibaba group

choose one




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