Supporting Albony mirror

We are happy to announce a grant of INR 50,000 to Albony mirror, a student run service which provides mirrors for various open-source projects and Linux distributions. Currently, Albony operates mirror nodes in Mumbai, Nagpur, Chennai, Aizawl and Hyderabad with new nodes launching soon.

Albony is one of the only few such mirrors in India serving more than 20,000 users daily. The project gets more than 200TB traffic / year, and is growing year on year. It is an official mirror for many projects and Linux distributions and the team wants to expand it to more projects.

The grant will be utilized for procuring storage drives for these mirror nodes and setting up new nodes in other parts of the country.

I have been operating this project since 2021, and it slowly and steadily grew, from having only one mode in Nagpur to having nodes in three different cities. Thousands of people rely on it daily to download their favourite open-source applications as mirror.albony.in is one of the only official mirrors in India.

I have been looking to expand my nodes across India to make something like a free software CDN where people will have fast access to open-source software. The demand is very high but the number of mirrors are less.

Fedora for example only has one mirror in India and the traffic levels are more than 1TB daily to it. I contacted many people and ISPs and new nodes are coming up now in Hyderabad and other parts of the country. These mirror nodes require money to function along with purchasing the storage and other hardware for it. Until now it has been funded by me and some other friends but to execute this expansion additional funds are required. I for example have been working on creating a DC like environment for my own node with a dedicated server room, server rack and redundant power supply.

-Shrirang Kahale, Maintainer, Albony Mirror

If you would like to support Albony mirror, please head on to their donations page.

This grant is made possible thanks to our Industry Partners who help us run the FOSS United Grants program. If you are an organisation that wants to give back to the FOSS Community, please reach out to us at foundation[at]fossunited[dot]org.

If you’re an Indian FOSS project looking for funds, please drop us an email at grants[at]fossunited[dot]org.