Hello,
We’ve recently been doing some work to modernize and improve our image servers.
New mirrors
The two frontend servers provided by Canonical Ltd. have been replaced by four new servers, two in the UK and two in the US, providing additional capacity and making maintenance easier by not having to temporarily re-route all traffic to another continent.
We always recommend everyone interact with our image servers through https://images.linuxcontainers.org which will then send you to the closest server for your location.
But should you have been using https://us.images.linuxcontainers.org or https://uk.images.linuxcontainers.org directly in the past, note that those two servers have been removed from DNS and are no longer reachable.
If you need to directly reach the new Canonical provided mirrors, you can do so using https://us.lxd.images.canonical.com or https://uk.lxd.images.canonical.com
Deprecation of the emulated LXD image protocol
Ever since we added LXD images to our image server, we’ve been providing an emulated LXD REST API as well (on port 8443). This was mimicking the LXD API by using some clever static files, a ton of symlinks and some nginx/apache rewrite rules.
While functional, it was very limited and only really useful to extremely old LXD releases which didn’t know how to access simplestreams based image server (LXD 0.x).
As there are effectively no legitimate active user of that API that we can find in our logs, we’ve deprecated it, allowing us to greatly reduce the image publication time on our side (generating all those symlinks was surprisingly expensive).
TLDR
We replaced our UK and US mirrors and deprecated pre-simplestreams LXD support on our image servers. Those changes should be invisible to anyone using the default URL for the image server.