I'm intrigued by p2p distribution like this but it makes me wonder if it's really more cost effective to switch/route all these small torrent packets instead of just using fileservers with 10G interfaces and maybe tiered caching.
"... a test where a 3G Docker image with 2 layers is downloaded by 2600 hosts concurrently (5200 blob downloads)"
they show this finishing in 20s, so that's 7,800 GB transferred in 20 seconds. That works out to 390 GB/sec. A 10Gbps interface can transfer about 1GB/sec, so you'd need 195 dual attached fileservers, or about 100 if they were running at 40gbps.
This line is far funnier than it should be. It reminds me of the time that I was told about how awful some architecture was because it would overload the network.
Their improved architecture sent lots of smaller files over NFS instead.
That was novel.
This is total nonsense. This would mean that instead of using 1200+ byte packets, bittorrent uses 120 byte packets to transfer data. This is easily disproven by looking at the implementation of any client or just by looking at the traffic and seeing that it uses 1200+ byte packets for sending chunks around.