Is any movements in GridFS replacement?

[Michael Savin]

Looks like not: https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/display/PLAT/GridFS+Replacement ?

[tlaw...@edx.org]

Hey there!  I'm a performance engineer over here at edX, and I've been partially involved in evaluating the performance of these platform services, so I can give you a rough answer.

Unfortunately, yes: progress has stalled out a bit lately.

There's a few factors here, in no particular order:

- MongoDB is a primary datastore, and the cost of staying with course assets in MongoDB is relatively low

- locked vs unlocked assets provide an interesting challenge that make it harder to switch wholesale to a "dumb" storage solution[1]

- S3 is what we, edx.org, would use because AWS is our infrastructure provider, but we don't want to hitch everyone's wagon to AWS

Generally speaking, these aren't blockers, and they're mostly addressed in the link to the wiki you mentioned.  I bring them up because they're the sort of things that make us go "hmm, with these things in mind, is this project the most important thing to be working on right now for edx-platform?"

We've also recently provided a mechanism for sticking a CDN in front of course assets, which alleviates the web server/MongoDB pressure for serving unlocked course assets[2], which further gives us breathing room to evaluate which platform-specific issues are the most pressing.

[1] - While S3 has support to generate signed URLs that could mimic the behavior of locked assets, there's a big loss in simplicity by having to make an external API request every single time a locked asset is requested, potentially multiple times per request, all during server-side rendering.  The biggest benefit of using S3 is being able to treat it as a "dumb" object store.

[2] - http://edx.readthedocs.io/projects/edx-installing-configuring-and-running/en/latest/configuration/static_replace/cdn.html?highlight=cdn

[Camilo Aguilar]

How are you guys using S3 instead as contentstore? For us using GridFS is too expensive unfortunately. I would love to have an option out of GridFS. Any guidance is very much appreciated.