2023-05-08 DevEx Meetup Notes

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Demos

Scheduled Topics

Orbstack - @Diana Huang

• Drop-in replacement for Docker Desktop (Mac-only)

  • Not open source and eventually will be paid

  • Theoretically more performant than Docker Desktop and has at least one promoter at 2u

  • Some performance numbers of related tools: https://github.com/docker/roadmap/issues/7#issuecomment-1503230816

  • https://github.com/edx/edx-arch-experiments/issues/93 (written by 2U Arch-BOM, who probably won’t have time to look deeply into this for a few months)

  • Question: Is there community interest and or/time for exploring it? Ideally we could get some eyes on it before the end of the year, when people may have to renew their Docker Desktop licenses.

    • Regis: interest but not him because he doesn’t own a mac : P

    • Next step: Discourse post.

    • Question: how important and how difficult is it to get Tutor working with Orbstack?

  • Ghassan - Docker Desktop doesn’t consume resources if you just open it without running anything

    • verified this on M1 and M2

    • the exception being that you have to tell Docker in advance how much memory it can take

    • this doesn’t address the issue of what happens when Docker is running containers

  • Does Orbstack support compose v2? Important for upcoming release.

Latest Tutor - @Régis Behmo

• Palm is being released next month. New breaking changes!

• @Kyle McCormick is pushing for Tutor to work on ARM and making bind-mount easier and faster

• Changes:

  • bind-mount is not available in tutor local. Instead, there is a MOUNTS setting for persistent bind-mounts.

  • optimizations for building images

    • pulls cache from remote registry. 3-4x speed improvement when building from scratch!

    • optimizations in the openedx dockerfile:

      • mounts a reusable pip cache folder, meaning we don’t have to rebuild reqs every time

      • This uses compose v2

  • Using the MOUNTS config, we can mount outside folders at build time

  • Question: is this available in dev as well as local?

    • Answer: yes.

  • Question: when mounting, how did it know where to replace the folder?

    • Answer: Automagic, using the edx-platform name

    • Can also use this for MFE repos

  • tl;dr: users will be able to develop and run using local forks/branches much faster

  • benchmarks in CI:

    • start: 35.8 m

    • with cache: 9.1

    • with cache + fork: 14

    • rebuild from fork: 7-11

Cross Pollination

• Tools/features/opportunities

• Tips and tricks

• Roadmap news

• Régis: try out the Palm branch \o/ https://github.com/overhangio/tutor/pull/827/

  • you will need the most recent version of compose ( docker compose instead of docker-compose)

• Becca:

  • We have a metrics vendor we like, we are in the process of vendor review. We hope this will give us useful things to show to the community

• Diana

  • I am beginning to think about developer data tickets and will hopefully be writing them up soon.

• Jeremy

  • Thoughtworks Tech Radar #28 is out, probably worth reviewing for good suggestions:

• Ghassan

  • Still working on a blog post about deploying Open edX from home using Mac Mini M2, the challenging part is that there are two ways to do it

    • Tunneling (probably for dev) It would rely on a remote instance for proxying the traffic

    • Port forward (requires router settings plus ISP)

Challenges

• Each challenge should have a follow up action.

• If you have an idea for follow up actions, add it.

• Or if you aren’t sure, leave it blank.

• We’ll discuss all actions either way.

Jeremy

• Actually executing on freeing up Arch-BOM from other commitments to devote more time to DX

Successes

• DevExp wins!

• Régis: Simplified the Tutor API by removing a lot of code

• Becca: Having an agenda! We love agendas!

Suggested Action Items

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