[DEPR]: Phase out edx-configuration

[feanil]

Proposal Date

30 November 2020

Ticket Acceptance Date

October 13, 2023

Technology Removal Date

After Redwood Cut

First Open edX Named Release Without This Functionality

Sumac

Rationale

N/A

Removal

N/A

Replacement

Tutor

Deprecation

No response

Migration

No response

Additional Info

For now a placeholder, this will eventually describe in detail how edx-configuration will stop being supported by edX, including:

• A date and/or Open edX release from which edx-configuration will no longer be supported
• A suggested alternative (possibly Tutor, via BTR-43)
• A suggested migration plan

Notes from Comments:

Kyle McCormick
February 11, 2022, 9:08 AM
Edited

I want to draw a distinction here:

• In the broader Open edX community, openedx/configuration is already rapidly being phased out.

  • As of Maple, the Ansible Native installation support was officially dropped in favor of Tutor. Some community members still use Ansible Native but I believe most intend to migrate to Tutor.

  • Devstack images are built from openedx/configuration, but we are replacing Devstack with Tutor, and will be probably ready to drop official Devstack support as of Nutmeg or Oak. (I need to make a DEPR ticket for this :)

  • As far as I know, the other miscellaneous playbooks in openedx/configuration are not generally used by the community, although we should check that assumption (eg, does OpenCraft depend on them for OCIM?)

• In my experience at edX/2U, though, they still use openedx/configuration heavily, especially in its older services.

  • They use it for:

    • build AMIs
    • deploying to prod/stage/sandbox
    • various automation needs
    • building devstack images

  • Their newer services use less/none of openedx/configuration.

  • There has been a push away from openedx/configuration, but migrating legacy services off of it will require non-trivial effort

Based on that:

• I see openedx/configuration as already de facto deprecated in the Open edX community. We should clean up this ticket and use it to formally propose the deprecation and see if anyone has objections to the direction we’re already rapidly heading.

• If that ^ DEPR goes though, edX/2U may still depend on the code for a while. So, the “Removal” step of this ticket could be transferring/forking the repostory back to the edx GitHub organization so that they can use it as long as they need to.

  • The work of removing edX/2U’s dependency on edx/configuration repo is probably best represented in their own tracking system instead of in a community DEPR ticket.

Jeremy Bowman
February 11, 2022, 8:33 AM

https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/AC/pages/2107441855/Braindump+on+Configuration+Today+and+Future is apparently the most detailed write-up we have so far regarding this. As noted in the original description, this ticket was less of “we plan to immediately prepare for this” and more “this is coming down the pipeline, if you have any objections or suggestions we’d like to hear them”. Progress on it so far has been gated on spare SRE bandwidth.

Original Jira Issue: https://openedx.atlassian.net/browse/DEPR-122

[dianakhuang]

Big usages of configuration:

• devstack
• 2U/edX deployments of older services (edx-platform, discovery, etc)
• 2U/edX sandboxes

Maybe we can start shaving some of these off the list.

[jmbowman]

I've created openedx-unsupported/devstack#943 as one step towards this and assigned it to the Arbi-BOM squad.

[dianakhuang]

At the very least, we have managed to find a solution for codejail on Tutor, which was one of the blockers of this work.