Retiring Programs Service

[Simon Chen]

Hi edX members:

TL;DR:

Over the next two months, the ECOM team is retiring the Programs Service (https://github.com/edx/programs).

Background:

The edX ECOM team created the Course Catalog Service (https://github.com/edx/course-discovery) to contain metadata on courses, organizations, and other ancillary models. This new service was designed to power our affiliate marketing initiative and our marketing site. As we further develop programs, it makes logical sense to include programs in the service rather than maintain a separate service to hold duplicative data. Thus it makes sense to sunset the Programs Service.

Plan:

1. Create the same Programs data fields in Course Catalog service
2. Expose new API endpoints for programs data in the Course Catalog service
3. Create managment commands to migrate data from the Programs service into the Course Catalog service
4. Update edX platform and other services to use Course Catalog service instead of Programs service, and remove all other references to the Program service
5. Take the Programs service offline
6. Delete the Program service repo

If you have questions or concerns, the ECOM team is available on the OpenEdX mailing list or in the #ecommerce channel on Slack.

[Simon Chen]

Hi edX members:

I want to clarify on the "Retiring Programs service" plan. edX is not going to execute all the steps detailed in the plan within 2 months. We are only going to actively pursue the first 3 steps (see the original post in the thread) in the plan in the 2 month timeframe. 

After that, with ample communication, we will gradually execute rest of the plan to retire the Programs service from active deployment with one minor change: Although we are not aware of anyone depending on the code that lives there, to maintain history, we will not be deleting the programs IDA repository in github.

Best

Simon Chen

sc...@edx.org

Best

Simon Chen
sc...@edx.org