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FAQ

Why Use Tutor?

Tutor is the official Docker-based Open edX distribution, both for production and local development. The goal of Tutor is to make it easy to deploy, customize, upgrade and scale Open edX. Tutor is reliable, fast, extensible, and it is already used to deploy hundreds of Open edX platforms around the world.

  • Runs on Docker
  • 1-click installation and upgrades
  • Comes with batteries included: theming, SCORM, HTTPS, web-based administration interface, mobile app, custom translations…
  • Extensible architecture with plugins
  • Works out of the box with Kubernetes
  • Amazing premium plugins available in the Tutor Wizard Edition, including Cairn the next-generation analytics solution for Open edX.

Why Use Docker?

In a word, Docker is about "Packaging" your software in a way that simplifies how it is installed and managed so that you benefit from fast, consistent delivery of your applications. A Docker container image is a lightweight, standalone, executable package of software that includes everything needed to run an application: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries and settings. Meanwhile, Docker is an open platform for developing, shipping, and running applications.

For context, any software which you traditionally relied on Linux package managers like apt, snap or yum can alternativley be installed and run as a Docker container. Some examples of stuff which an Open edX platform depends: Nginx, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, and the Open edX application software itself which Tutor bundles into a container using Docker Compose.

Why Use Kubernetes?

Kubernetes manages Docker containers in a deployment enviornment. It provides an easy way to scale your application, and is a superior, cost-effective alternative to you manually creating and maintaing individual virtual servers for each of your backend services. It keeps code operational and speeds up the delivery process. Kubernetes enables automating a lot of resource management and provisioning tasks.

Your Open edX platform runs via multiple Docker containers: the LMS Django application , CMS Django application, one or more Celery-based worker nodes for each of these applications, nginx, Caddy, and any backend services that tutor manages like Nginx and SMTP for example. Kubernetes creates EC2 instances and then decides where to place each of these containers based on various real-time resource-based factors. This leads to your EC2 instances carrying optimal workloads, all the time. Behind the scenes Kubernetes (EKS in our case) uses an EC2 Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) with an auto-scaling policy, both of which you can see from the AWS EC2 dashboard.

Why Use Terraform?

Terraform allows you to manage the entire lifecycle of your AWS cloud infrastructure using infrastructure as code (IAC). That means declaring infrastructure resources in configuration files that are then used by Terraform to provision, adjust and tear down your AWS cloud infrastructure. There are tangential benefits to using IAC.

  1. Maintain all of your backend configuration data in a single location. This allows you to take a more holistic, top-down approach to planning and managing your backend resources, which leads to more reliable service for your users.
  2. Leverage git. This is a big deal! Managing your backend as IAC means you can track individual changes to your configuration over time. More importantly, it means you can reverse backend configuration changes that didn't go as planned.
  3. It's top-down and bottom-up. You can start at the network design level and work your way up the stack, taking into consideration factors like security, performance and cost.
  4. More thorough. You see every possible configuration setting for each cloud service. This in turns helps to you to consider all aspects of your configuration decisions.
  5. More secure. IAC leads to recurring reviews of software versions and things getting patched when they should. It compels you to regularly think about the ages of your passwords. It makes it easier for you to understand how network concepts like subnets, private networks, CIDRs and port settings are being used across your entire backend.
  6. Saves money. Taking a top-down approach with IAC will lead to you proactively and sensibly sizing your infrastructure, so that you don't waste money on infrastructure that you don't use.
  7. It's what the big guys use. Your Open edX backend contains a lot of complexity, and it provides a view into the far-larger worlds of platforms like Google, Facebook, Tiktok and others. Quite simply, technology stacks have evolved to a point where we no longer have the ability to artesanlly manage any one part. That in a nutshell is why major internet platforms have been so quick to adopt tools like Terraform.

Why Use Terragrunt?

Terragrunt is a thin wrapper that provides extra tools for keeping your configurations DRY, working with multiple Terraform modules, and managing remote state. DRY means don't repeat yourself. That helped a lot with self-repeating modules we had to use in this architecture.