Learning DevOps: Continuously Deliver Better Software

Creating an Apt mirror using aptly

At its most basic, an apt repository is a simple web server that serves both packages and more importantly, it serves the metadata that describes the contents of the repository. Although you can use the repositories that Ubuntu provides to build your hosts, you will hit two issues. The first being that the packages are updated all the time, meaning a host you build this week may not be the same as a host that was built the week before. The second issue is that depending on your build, you could potentially use a lot of bandwidth. If you have five hundred hosts and you suddenly need to update Bash on all of them due to a security issue, you are going to use a huge amount of bandwidth. It's a much better practice ...