Agenda:

1. Have folks tried out Hawthorn? How has it been so far?
   1. Notes image was missing in docker devstack but should be fixed.
   2. RETIRE_USER_SALTS setting, what does it do and where should the docs go?
2. We plan on having a Hawthorn Day to try out the new release on July 30th 2pm EDT/18:00 UTC and conclude the next day at 2pm EDT/18:00 UTC
3. Reminder that we have a list of open INCR issues that give a person unfamiliar with the Open edX codebase to start contributing quickly.
   1. Including a new ops related epic:
4. edX testing AWS Aurora as a MySQL alternative.
5. edX recently updated the ability to put the LMS and CMS in maintenance mode.
   1. The previously functionality was buggy and only really worked for edX.
   2. The new functionality should work for anyone who can serve their maintenance page from S3.
   3. Playbook to manage maintenance: https://github.com/edx/configuration/blob/master/playbooks/edx_maintenance.yml
   4. PRs
      1. Wrapper script: https://github.com/edx/configuration/pull/4691
      2. Maintenance enable/disable playbook: https://github.com/edx/configuration/pull/4676
      3. Nginx Config:
         1. https://github.com/edx/configuration/pull/4673
         2. https://github.com/edx/configuration/pull/4690
6. Recent edX security audit

Notes:

• Hawthorne
  • Not waiting for any new features to land in Hawthorne, just bug and security fixes.
    • So RC2 should not have a major delta from RC1
  • Having to take downtime for openedx releases is not long-term tenable.
    • Elton to work with JMW to figure out what we want to do to make things better.