dl.k8s.io to adopt a Content Delivery Network

--- layout: blog title: "dl.k8s.io to adopt a Content Delivery Network" date: 2023-06-09 slug: dl-adopt-cdn --- **Authors**: Arnaud Meukam (VMware), Hannah Aubry (Fast Forward), Frederico Muñoz (SAS Institute) We're happy to announce that dl.k8s.io, home of the official Kubernetes binaries, will now be powered by [Fastly](https://www.fastly.com). Fastly is known for its high-performance content delivery network designed to deliver content quickly and reliably around the world. With its powerful network, Fastly will help us deliver official Kubernetes binaries to users faster and more reliably than ever before. The decision to use Fastly was made after an extensive evaluation process in which we carefully evaluated several potential content delivery network providers. Ultimately, we chose Fastly because of their commitment to the open internet and proven track record of delivering fast and secure digital experiences to some of the most known open source projects (through their [Fast Forward](https://www.fastly.com/fast-forward) program). ## What you need to know about this change - On Monday, July 24th, the IP addresses and backend storage associated with the dl.k8s.io domain name will change. - The change will have no impact to the vast majority of users, since the domain name will remain the same. - If you restrict access to specific IP ranges, access to the dl.k8s.io domain could stop working. If you think you may be impacted, or would like to know more about this change, please keep reading. ## Why are we making this change The official Kubernetes binaries site, dl.k8s.io, is used by thousands of users all over the world, and currently serves _more than 5PB of binaries each month_. This change will allow us to improve access to those resources by leveraging a world-wide CDN. ## Does this affect dl.k8s.io only, or are other domains also affected? Only dl.k8s.io will be affected by this change. ## My company whitelists domain names that we are allowed to access. Will this change affect the domain name? No, the domain name (dl.k8s.io) will remain the same: no change will be necessary and access to the Kubernetes release binaries site should not be affected. ## My company uses some form of IP filtering, will this change affect access to the site? If IP-based filtering is in place, it’s possible that access to the site will be affected when the new IP addresses become active. ## If my company doesn’t use IP addresses to restrict network traffic, do we need to do anything? No, the switch to the CDN should be unnoticeable. ## What next steps would you recommend? If you have IP-based filtering in place, we recommend the following course of action **before July, 24th**: - Add the new IP addresses to your allowlist. - Conduct tests with your networks/firewall to ensure your networks can route to the new IP addresses. After the change is made, we recommend to double-check that HTTP calls are accessing dl.k8s.io with the new IP addresses. ## What are new IP addresses? The new IP addresses are available [here](https://api.fastly.com/public-ip-list), for both IPv4 and IPv6. ## Will there be a dual running period? **No, it is a cutover.** You can, however, test your networks right now to check if they can route to the new public IP addresses from Fastly. You should add the new IPs to your network's `allowlist` before July 24th. Once the transfer is complete, make sure your networks are using the new IP addresses to connect to the dl.k8s.io. ## What should I do if I detect some abnormality after the cutover date? If you encounter any weirdness during binaries download, please [open an issue](https://github.com/kubernetes/k8s.io/issues).