From a network point of view, BitTorrent is horrendous. It has no way of knowing network topology which frequently means traffic flows from eyeball network to eyeball network for which there is no "cheap" path available (potentially causing congestion of transit ports affecting everyone) and no reliable way of forecasting where the traffic will come from making capacity planning a nightmare.
Additionally, as anyone who has tried to share an internet connection with someone heavily torrenting, the excessive number of connections means overall quality of non-torrent traffic on networks goes down.
Not to mention, of course, that BitTorrent has a significant stigma attached to it.
The answer would have been a squid cache box before, but https makes that very difficult as you would have to install mitm certs on all devices.
For container images, yes you have pull through registries etc, but not only are these non-trivial to setup (as a service and for each client) the cloud providers charge quite a lot for storage making it difficult to justify when not having a check "works just fine".
The Linux distros (and CPAN and texlive etc) have had mirror networks for years that partially addresses these problems, and there was an OpenCaching project running that could have helped, but it is not really sustainable for the wide variety of content that would be cached outside of video media or packages that only appear on caches hours after publishing.
BitTorrent might seem seductive, but it just moves the problem, it doesn't solve it.
Additionally, as anyone who has tried to share an internet connection with someone heavily torrenting, the excessive number of connections means overall quality of non-torrent traffic on networks goes down.
Not to mention, of course, that BitTorrent has a significant stigma attached to it.
The answer would have been a squid cache box before, but https makes that very difficult as you would have to install mitm certs on all devices.
For container images, yes you have pull through registries etc, but not only are these non-trivial to setup (as a service and for each client) the cloud providers charge quite a lot for storage making it difficult to justify when not having a check "works just fine".
The Linux distros (and CPAN and texlive etc) have had mirror networks for years that partially addresses these problems, and there was an OpenCaching project running that could have helped, but it is not really sustainable for the wide variety of content that would be cached outside of video media or packages that only appear on caches hours after publishing.
BitTorrent might seem seductive, but it just moves the problem, it doesn't solve it.