Large Instances Meeting Notes 2025-08-19

(AI summarized)

Attendees: Braden MacDonald, Felipe Montoya, and Moisés González.

Felipe opened with updates on his work with the new AI extensibility framework working group. Braden shared that he is beginning an evaluation of Typesense as an alternative to Meilisearch, addressing concerns about high availability. This led to a broader discussion on whether the community should standardize the catalog API interface to be independent of specific search backends like ElasticSearch or Meilisearch, with both Braden and Felipe agreeing that adopting a unified data format before indexing would simplify development and improve performance.

The group then shifted to infrastructure challenges. Moisés raised an issue encountered when migrating forums to MySQL, specifically around character set collation with external databases, and pointed to a pending Tutor pull request to fix it. After discussion, all agreed the fix looked like a good thing, since UTF8MB4 support is increasingly essential, even if it slightly increases storage requirements. Felipe emphasized supporting modern defaults to avoid costly developer time debugging encoding errors. He also updated the group on changes in customer hosting models, noting a move from lightweight multi-tenancy to Harmony-based namespaces for better maintainability.

Braden highlighted OpenCraft’s exploration of deploying instances with Picasso, Harmony, and DryDock (“PHD stack”), which aligns well with their needs for sandbox environments and Kubernetes migration. Felipe noted that while their own usage of sandboxes is limited due to cost, they are open to collaboration and welcomed contributions. The team also discussed GitHub runner usage, agreeing that cloud-hosted runners are sufficient for most needs, though larger jobs sometimes require higher-capacity runners.

Toward the end, conversation turned to frontend technology challenges. Felipe and Braden noted the strain of maintaining many microfrontends (MFEs), large bundle sizes, and slow Webpack builds. They expressed optimism about newer build tools written in Rust and improvements in Paragon and design tokens, which should ease performance bottlenecks. Both agreed the community needs more contributors maintaining core frontend infrastructure, rather than only feature-focused MFEs. Despite challenges, there was a sense of progress, with Braden noting active work on a new shell application and Felipe observing that the community’s frontend expertise is maturing.