2023-08-28 DevEx Meetup Notes

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Scheduled Topics / Demos

• Kyle: tutor mounts populate demo

  • Technical issues

• Jeremy: Container Runtime Comparison

  • Docker desktop starting charging recently depending on some confusing criteria, including for orgs of 2U’s size

  • Docker Desktop vs Engine

    • Engine is free - it runs on Linux

    • Docker Desktop adds a VM to run Docker Engine. This is why it’s required on macOS

    • Colima is just the VM - it runs Docker Engine in the VM itself

  • Note that Docker Engine cannot run directly on

  • 2U is looking at alternatives

    • OrbStack - also proprietary, ~$8/user/month after beta is done, seems to be ~3x as fast. Also better default settings.

    • Colima - open source, entirely CLI, comparable performance to Docker desktop. Also able to install in CI (not possible for Docker Desktop due to licensing)

    • Rancher, Podman - don’t seem to work out of the box

      • Podman is not exactly drop-in Docker, it’s more oriented around RedHat ecosystem

  • For Open edX devs

    • You can stick with Docker Desktop

    • Can try OrbStack, although it might cost money

    • Colima - also worth trying

  • For Docker, OrbStack, and Colima: All intended to be compatible implementations of docker

  • In Jeremy’s experience, they can be installed side by side with switching being pretty seamless

  • Recommandations (in docs)

    • 2U would need to go through vendor review internally

      • 2U isn’t even certain they want to stick with local development for their employees vs. a totally hosted dev environment

        • OrbStack seems to make local dev more palatable, thoug

        • 2U’s hosted env is currently a bit of a temporary thing

  • OrbStack doesn’t seem to be a big company – all their PR and all our interactions with them(?) have been with a single person

  • OrbStack has a nice volume mounting interface - works around bind-mouting slowness on macOS

  • 2U: Fully hosted vs local dev envs

    • What’s the advantage of fully hosted?

      • Folks who have worked at a place with a fully hosted env really loved it, esp when the story was “one click and I have a dev env”

      • That’s not the case currently for Open edX. More like:

        • Local devstack is ~20 minutes

        • Hosted devstack is ~5 minutes (although first time setup is a little higher)

      • Hosted devstack at 2U is just a hosted Devstack instance in an EC2 instance that you manage through AWS

      • Other devs can jump in easier just by ssh’ing

      •  

Cross Pollination

• Tools/features/opportunities

• Tips and tricks

• Roadmap news

• [Diana]

  • We have a team at 2U that is lookin into implementing their own version of developer data. It is currently very enterprise-centric, so not quite as useful to the community yet, but hopefully will be in the future.

  • I can’t remember if I announced this before, but we have announced and set acceptance dates on two significant deprecation tickets:

    • [DEPR]: Phase out edx-configuration · Issue #51 · openedx/public-engineering

    • [DEPR] Devstack · Issue #247 · openedx/public-engineering

• [Jeremy]

  • Arch-BOM is considering work to make it easier to deploy the LMS and Studio in Kubernetes (at least at 2U, may help others as well)

    • Finish plan for edxapp containerization · Issue #419 · edx/edx-arch-experiments

• [kyle]

  • Working on faster provisioning for mounted edx-platform with tutor mounts populate command (directly copies assets, node_modules, etc. from image to host). Generalizable to other service, too, e.g. course-discovery.

  • Still testing new optimized Tutor Dockerfile with new static assets build

    • [Jeremy] I recently discovered Earthly - Make Builds Super Simple , wonder if it could help with image build optimization

  •  

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.

[Becca] Haven’t had time to try Tutor again, nor really do much in the way of DevEx at all

[Emad] some contributions to different openedx repos(mostly MFEs). MRs are stuck for weeks :))

Successes

• DevExp wins!

• [kyle] I’ve been using Tutor + Library Authoring Plugin in order to work on Content Libraries V2, and it’s been going smoothly

• [kyle] Starting now (in Nightly) and in Quince, Tutor will assume docker buildx is available, which is much better at parallelization, caching, & has a better interface.

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