Action items
- Joel Barciauskas (Deactivated) write the list of questions/considerations for starting new IDAs.
...
- What are things that are IDAs now?
- edx-platform
- LMS
- Studio
- comments service (aka forums)
- insights
- analytics api
- ecommerce
- student notes
- notifier
- xqueue
- Drupal
- edx-platform
- What is not?
- ORA
- submissions
- edX search
- milestones
- proctoring
- teams
- What should be an IDA but is not yet?
- LMS
- Studio
- Search
- Certificates
- Student state storage
- Users and Auth
- XBlocks
- Modulestore
- Veda
- Criteria for IDAs
- Scale
- Security
- Group ownership, decoupling
- Replaceability
- Barrier to entry
- Deployment
- Isolation of failure
- Velocity
- Non-criteria
- Don't be too granular
- Doesn't have it's own data store?
- why isn't that a library?
- Be careful:
- No need to introduce network hops just to get decoupling
- What is "too many" about services?
- operational complexity
- need infrastructure and tooling
- performance implications of network hops
- Independently Deployable Libraries?
- make stuff pip-installable, then release versions of your library.
- we can also host our own pypi
- people need to review all their requirements on a regular basis
- Open edX
- How do we help adopters with the complexity of micro-services?
- Create a shim so you inline IDAs.
- This is a common idea
- but doesn't seem to exist in the Python world
- Having both local and remote is extra complexity,
- we don't want to have to test both/all configurations all the time
- Many of our IDAs now are optional
- Once we have a user service IDA, then everyone needs to use it.
- can we have default implementations as alternatives to what edx.org uses?
- Programs in particular
- there's no point in programs without courses.
- but there's no point in insights without courses, either.
- Seems like there are more IDAs than we thought (more than 10)
- Each new IDA should be discussed with the Arch Council
- We have a spectrum of IDAs
- think xqueue vs insights
- Do we have incentives in place to split apart LMS?
- new stuff is definitely separate
- splitting lms and cms is in plan for this year
- it's more than just moving code
- it also means different data stores
- it also means one-to-many studio/lms
- putting interfaces into edx-platform could start cleaning up edx-platform (see Extending edX Platform)
- There are simple things we can do:
- Move XBlock and other pluggable requirements out of edx-platform, so we can update XBlocks without pushing edx-platform
- Splitting common functionality into libraries
- Pluggable interfaces give good isolation
- Extracting existing code into a new library is a big job.
- do we need separate projects to do clean up?
- or do we budget it as part of the projects that need the separation?
- we need patterns established
- do we feel too much time pressure to do the clean up?
- it's hard to estimate the clean up work
- can we time-box it?
- we aren't in a position to quantify the impact of debt on velocity
- product has been reasonable about giving time where eng needed to clean up
- engineers need to be able to market their changes
- Follow-ons:
- Operations technology that can help with this?
- troubleshooting IDA constellations
- will need coordination technology that can run locally and remotely
- Clinton is working on templates and patterns for IDAs
- Can deploys be just a pip install?
- no one is working on this