Large Instances Meeting Notes 2025-09-16

AI Summary:

Braden MacDonald
- No major updates.
- Team continues exploring the PHD stack (Picasso, Harmony, Drydock) migration.
- Began benchmarking Typesense as an alternative to Meilisearch.
Felipe Montoya
- Collaborating with the Picasso team on making Tutor data handling more flexible (e.g., config file locations).
- Working on AI extensibility plugin development; expects to push this further in Oct–Nov and onboard contributors.
Maksim Sokolskiy
- No major updates this cycle, mostly in read-only mode.
- Presented Felipe’s AI repo to someone who may begin exploring it.
Moisés González
- At an internal hackathon, tested the MariaDB Operator for Kubernetes:
  - Deploys robust MySQL-compatible DBs within a namespace.
  - Supports high availability (Galera, primary/secondary), multiple backup types, and integrates with monitoring.
  - Successfully prototyped deployment with Open edX.

Cloudflare:
- Felipe raised its relevance due to AI scraping controls; attendees had only limited free-tier experience, no large-scale production usage reported.
Nginx & ACME:
- Recent improvements in native ACME certificate handling noted.
- Discussion on past migration from Caddy → Nginx → Ingress in Tutor.
- Some concerns about future compatibility but overall stable.
Kubernetes Gateway API:
- Braden and Moisés discussed how Gateway aims to replace Ingress for better flexibility and security.

Felipe to advance AI plugin work and revisit in Oct/Nov.
Explore whether the MariaDB Operator could improve Open edX hosting infrastructure.
Keep monitoring Kubernetes and ingress/gateway developments for future implications.

Meeting length: ~15 minutes.
Next meeting: In two weeks.