Devstack notes from edX developer survey

the devstack environment is extremely limited and takes a ton of setup to get the system into a state where it can invoke the one thing I'm interested in. There is no environment with data that you can stop and work in for the main platform, staging is on the release train that said a ton of work has gone into having a devstack at all and it's very useful despite being limited. My dissatisfaction is not "this sucks" it's "this is a significant timesink and will not be enough going forward"

 MFE Front End development & configuration management: many people on my team have had issues with their local instance of learning MFE in the past couple weeks. There have been changes to have this work by default (rather than old courseware), but when you reprovision there are waffle flags that are needed but not set and not documented on confluence or the readme

it should be easier to rebuild your local environment with devstack - we lack sufficient seed data and other things to make this an easy, quick, reproducible process. ive seen it limit certain kinds of local experimentation - people are afraid to make mistakes which might require them to rebuild their local environment because of the major hassle it is to rebuild. if problems crop up, often other engineers need to get involved to help troubleshoot when (imo) it would be easier if the engineer could just start over with a clean setup. i imagine it also limits open-source contributors to only the most willing/fearless.

time invested in improving devstack speed (or honestly devstack replacment, it will very soon be impossible to work with on a laptop) will pay off a lot

while devstack has made improvements, there are still loose ends and incremental improvements should be made, e.g., enterprise stuff doesn’t have devstack, populating test data locally is time consuming, creating course and license data etc all take up extra time

Devstack is broken and almost unusable at this point. We should make investments in sandboxes or other cloud based dev environments that can handle the growing size of our production infrastructure, because continuing to add images to a local solution just doesn't scale.

Additionally, we don't do a great job as a company setting up devstack with the right config (and maybe shouldn't?) so trying to get someone ready for a certain state can take a day of development.