🇨🇳 Mainland China network issues

Hi guys,

I have learned a lot on the topic of deliverability lately, especially in the context of the the Chinese Internet.

To put it simply, you really need to put a CDN in front of S3. It’s dead easy to setup and will do wonders for your deliverability issues (yeah you have some :wink:). Right now, AFAICT all artefact downloads are served straight from S3 us-east-1. This yields some really bad bandwidth and latency in a lot of corners of the world — which is rather fine for OTA updates — and a high failure rate in mainland China, which is very much less fine. You can enable S3 logging to monitor and put a number on that if you’re interested.

For the world, a simple Cloudfront CDN will do magic and can likely be deployed to production in minutes. For mainland China, you’ll need a private link through the GFW which can be obtained from one of the Chinese ISPs (China Telecom, China Unicom, China Mobile), so your Chinese CDN PoPs have a reliable link to your S3 origin. Expect something in the 1-5k$/mo range for the link, and you’ll need to setup a Chinese company to obtain an ICP number. Larger CDN providers like Verizon or Akamai can likely provide a more streamlined, one-stop solution.

CDN delivery would fit very well with your Entreprise plan…

Best

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