Large Instances Meeting Notes 2023-07-25

Video recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sPu72NS6bkV38de_elSGgFq3gukzmqP0/view?usp=sharing

Notes:

1. Assign meeting lead and note taker.

2. Greetings & introductions as needed. n/a

Updates from each org on the call

2U, eduNEXT, OpenCraft, Raccoon Gang. What's new with your deployment(s)?

eduNEXT: @Moisés González : Looking into deploying MFEs with a CDN. The tutor prod setup doesn’t let you change the public URL setting at build time, so need to resolve that. @Felipe Montoya We probably want to alter the index.html file directly to put the CDN path in there, to point to all the .js, .css files etc. on a CDN, and then the Tutor image can host only the index file. Q: Why is index.html not also on the CDN? A: to be able to change it quickly and easily. Also, sometimes we want to deploy the MFE at a subfolder, not a separate domain.

OpenCraft: @Gábor Boros I reviewed monitoring PR, sorry for not posting the review on time. @Braden MacDonald Been working on deploying sandboxes using our k8s infrastructure. Lots of issues related to Tutor/Palm/edx-platform versions (nightly, palm, master) and getting them all to work together. @Gábor Boros I’ve been working a lot on sandboxes for PRs and we mostly have it working!

@Moisés González At a recent internal hackathon, we were exploring using ArgoCD to trigger deployments based on a PR.

2U: @Jeremy Bowman (Deactivated) Continued work on devstack upgrades, getting ARM images for it, continuing to research devstack vs Tutor dev vs k8s based environment. Q: is any ansible used in building the container images still? A: No, ansible is gone. Maybe a few random services still use it, but all the main django services don’t use ansible anymore. Just uses the Dockerfile that’s in each repo (dev and prod variants of each).

[Discussion of partial deployments, like 6 services in prod mode and only one in dev mode, to keep resources light.]

Racoon Gang: @Maksim Sokolskiy : From time to time, we have to support old versions of Open edX. Recently we had to work on Hawthorn. It wasn’t working on M1, but I got it working with a bit of patching. Still having trouble with ElasticSearch though.

Another Q from Maksim: what are the status of multi-tenant environments / microsites? @Felipe Montoya : We are maintaining a tenant plugin GitHub - eduNEXT/eox-tenant: Plugin for managing multiple tenants (organizations) within a single Open edX instance. because we were tired of maintaining the SiteConfiguration feature, and it had a lot of pain points for developers. Our eox-tenant uses an anti-pattern to modify the django settings admittedly, but once it does that everything just works really well. There are still 4-5 features that we have to put into the platform code, but we’re hoping to migrate those to filters in the future. @Maksim Sokolskiy : How do you work with MFEs? A: That’s part of what we were talking about earlier with index.html and modifying the MFEs. Mostly what you need is available within the limits of existing MFE configuration and Paragon alpha version’s design tokens etc. We plan to maintain eox-tenant indefinitely.

@Maksim Sokolskiy Maintaining Olive release with MFEs and building them all separately to do multitenancy is a big pain for us.

@Braden MacDonald : We typically try to focus on Harmony-style deployments with shared MySQL, ElasticSearch, etc. but still separate LMS deployments, because of these pain points.

Harmony project updates: Review list of PRs and issues, and assign anything un-assigned.

One in progress ticket - Karpenter - and @Jhony Avella is on vacation but will resume it as soon as he’s back.

What should our next priority be?

Let’s move Identify next steps until we can run this · Issue #26 · openedx/openedx-k8s-harmony to in progress, and can each person please review that ticket and comment on it?

Open discussion/questions, if any.