Concerns over sonicstorage.blob.core.windows.net downtime

[wdoekes]

Over the weekend, sonicstorage.blob.core.windows.net had been in private mode (as far as I can tell).
That meant that everyone who tried to build a SONiC image from friday until now, couldn't.

These tickets all concern those build failures:
#20749
#20737
#20685

In one of them, @liushilongbuaa writes "Fixed" without any explanation. In another, @Gfrom2016 says that "[public] access has been re-enabled".

As a community member, I'd very much like to know a few things:

• How did the access get toggled to private?
• What are the chances that this ever happens again?
• How can we guard against this? Both through technical means (mirrors, cache, fallback location at upstream) and through policy means (who gets to toggle this)?

We'd love to help test and develop SONiC as SDN core component, but we will be hesitant to invest time and money if we cannot depend on the build consistenly working. (In this case: depend on dependencies being available.)

For the debian components, we know that they will be available. And github objects we can certainly source from somewhere if needed. But for instance the broadcom files, like libsaibcm_11.2.13.1_amd64.deb, seem to be available only on the sonicstorage. (Where is its upstream?) This makes us fear that someone on the internet can just pull the plug and disable the builds without any moments notice.

Please take a moment and address our concerns.

Thank you!
Walter Doekes
OSSO B.V.