Moving away from DigitalOcean

[braden (Braden MacDonald)]

Hi guys,

I would like to keep this moving forward. What do you suggest as next steps?

I’m thinking a few separate tasks:

1. Post on the Open edX community forums + Slack to ask (A) who is using non-AWS/Google/Azure hosting, and how their experience has been, and (B) who is interested in collaborating on support for deploying large/many Open edX instances on other clouds or infra.
2. Make a short-list of alternative providers, ideally limiting ourselves for now to those who offer Managed K8S + Managed MySQL/MariaDB + object storage + Terraform. That criteria should shorten the list quite a bit.
3. It could be worth investigating options for deploying databases when managed databases aren’t available from the provider, or simply to make our database deployments consistent across all non-AWS providers. (For example, if we were using PostgreSQL, Pigsty [“open source RDS”] looks like an ideal way to manage it on any VM or even bare metal hosting service. For MySQL/MongoDB I don’t know if there’s anything as nice, but Percona Operator for MongoDB looks pretty good for MongoDB. Same for managed storage: Garage or RustFS. This could be deferred until we have a client [Ethiopia?] that requires it, but it could be good to do a timeboxed investigation now so we have some options in hand.) It doesn’t have to be all or nothing either - we could decide that we always deploy our own MongoDB on clusters using the Percona Operator, but rely on managed services for Object Storage + MySQL. (Since those are commonly available, but MongoDB is not.)

[samuel]

@braden

It could be worth investigating options for deploying databases when managed databases aren’t available from the provider,

Something that may be worth looking at here is Juju. It brings its own complexity, but does have operators for many databases, both on K8s and VMs/bare metal.

[gabor (Gábor Boros)]

@braden

Post on the Open edX community forums + Slack to ask (A) who is using non-AWS/Google/Azure hosting, and how their experience has been, and (B) who is interested in collaborating on support for deploying large/many Open edX instances on other clouds or infra.

Anyone wants to take this? If nobody volunteers until Wednesday, I can do it.

@braden

• Make a short-list of alternative providers, ideally limiting ourselves for now to those who offer Managed K8S + Managed MySQL/MariaDB + object storage + Terraform. That criteria should shorten the list quite a bit.

I support this! Rolling our own things would require way more effort and probably not something that most of the community members would want to do anyway.

[braden (Braden MacDonald)]

@gabor

Anyone wants to take this? If nobody volunteers until Wednesday, I can do it.

Sounds like it’s yours, @gabor. Let me know if you want any help. Thanks!

[gabor (Gábor Boros)]

Yeah, I guess I won it I’ll sort it out this week.