Coep/ELT meeting/OERuInfoTechOverview

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Summary of the OERu Tech Proposition

  • We maintain a globally distributed network of Cloud-based commodity hosting infrastructure to power our Next Generation Digital Learning Environment (NGDLE)
  • Our NGDLE is entirely Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), with the exception of Zoom (BBB is currently being evaluated as a FOSS replacement) and Google Analytics (to be augmented/replaced by FOSS Matomo)
  • Our NGDLE is a "loosely coupled" collection of best-of-breed FOSS applications, almost all self-hosted
  • Our NGDLE provides software services for
    • educators collaboratively building Open Educational Resources (OERs)
    • delivering OER-based courses to learners across the globe on computers or mobile devices
    • providing software tools educators can incorporate into courses to make them richer, more compelling and effective for learners
    • helping learners collaborate and communicate with one another
    • marketing the OERu's offerings
    • monitoring & backing up the OERu's infrastructure
    • strategic development, testing, and staging support
    • sharing our IT solution "recipes" and insights
    • managing collaborative FOSS development
  • In 2019 we have supported ~6000 registered, and ~24,000 anonymous, learners
  • 2019 IT costs (not including our one FTE salary): $5836
  • Case Study showing cost savings combined with capacity improvements: Mautic 'email marketing automation' application (like "MailChimp on steroids"...)

Presentation for illustration purposes File:OERu's NGDLE for ELTs.pdf - PDF version

More details on the OERu Tech Stack and its performance

This section provides further insight into the OERu's technology stack, used to assemble our rigorous fully-OER courses, deliver them for learners, and support their interactions. We will

  • We have created a rich set of functionality to support our OER creators and learners, built entirely from a remarkable array of Free and Open Source Software services.
  • Our major focus for this year has been "preparing to scale up"
    • Our apps, and the FOSS stacks on which they depend are already tried and tested at "Internet scale"
    • We can enable maximum flexibility and opportunity for graceful capacity growth by consistently using Docker to "containerise" our services - this allows us to keep our services well segmented, manageable, and the role-based recipes that containerisation requires make it easy for us to make use of additional computing resources. We can also "graduate" to Kubernetes (a heavyweight containerisation management environment developed by Google) if we need to automate managing computing resources on a massive scale.
  • provide an update on the status of the global OERu infrastructure - re-factored, updated, "technical debt" paid.
    • moved from Microsoft Azure (Sydney, AU) and Amazon EC (Portland, Oregon, US) to four Digital Ocean (San Francisco, California, US) compute instances: make, learn, share, about.
    • all hosts are current Ubuntu Long Term Support 18.04, supported until 2023
    • removed all production services from high power server co-located at Hetzner in Germany. The server, "try.oerfoundation.org", is now used exclusively for development and staging as well as off-site, encrypted, incremental backups from all other servers onto its bountiful (nearly) 5TB of disk space.
    • added sponsored (fully FOSS) NZ-based infrastructure from Catalyst Cloud
  • new FOSS capabilities
  • review the performance of the learner and educator-facing systems
    • nearly 6000 registered users enrolled in courses
    • ~24,000 anonymous learners supported
    • little or no unscheduled down-time
    • no performance issues - no system currently exceeding (on average) 50% of CPU, Memory, or Disk allocation which means headroom for growth. Also, all hosts can have specifications increased in situ by paying for more capacity (doubled specification = double cost).
  • review updated costs (prices in USD) = $312/month or $3744/year
    • Digital Ocean Servers: (4 x 8GB RAM + 4 CPU + 160GB disk @ $48 each/month including automatic backups) + 400GB extra disk space @ $40/month = $232/month or $2784/year
    • Hetzner co-located server: (1 x 16GB RAM + 16 CPU + 4.8TB disk @ $35/month or $420/year
    • Kanboard (FOSS kanban Software-as-a-Service): $30/month or $360/year
    • Zoom (proprietary video conferencing tool): $15/month or $180/year (we are looking at FOSS alternatives)
  • look at new custom developed capabilities
  • OERu partner opportunities
    • trial new technology - point your IT teams at our tech overviews and howtos and our FOSS source code repositories. We've created many Docker recipes, too, which make it very quick and easy for a skilled IT person to set up a new system for a organisational pilot (or for production).
    • before spending large on a proprietary technology... ask us - you can think of us as your "open technology ally"! We're practised at making the case for open technologies and can offer our experience to help provide confidence to your organisation. Remember, too: adopting one of the FOSS technologies we've proven could save your institution many years worth of OERu membership fees in a single year - we'd be happy to help you do trial it!
    • software maintenance: a problem shared is a problem halved. We would love to work with your teaching and IT departments to help your institution select and maintain useful FOSS services.
    • all of our technologies, especially with commodity FOSS cloud hosting, are within reach of our Outreach Partners.
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