Deploying Sumac with Tutor on Multiple Servers Without Kubernetes

[joel.edwards]

As far as I understand, what you’re asking isn’t officially supported/documented outside of a k8s deployment, you might find some useful information about this in the tutorials documentation Running Open edX at scale, in particular the section Offloading data storage discusses having resources such as MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, etc running on a separate dedicated system.

There is a very similar conversation that happened here: Horizontal Scaling - CMS/LMS and Workers
But my takeaway from that is that this would be a very complex and unsupported configuration that you would be expected to develop and maintain on your own if you get it to work.

@dave

If you are considering the above, I think it will be very painful. I guess it technically might work if you spin up a separate non-k8s Tutor instance with mostly just lms-worker instances and used config to point it to a shared Redis + shared MongoDB + shared file/object store (S3?) + shared MySQL + shared Elasticsearch (i.e. everything that persists data)… but I don’t know of anyone who runs it like that, and I imagine any such setup would be fragile and break in weird ways in practice because there’s going to be a bunch of non-obvious config that will need to be just right (e.g. encryption/signing keys).

So I think if you want to scale out up LMS workers, the practical path forward is either going to be scaling up your hardware to be a much bigger instance, or to start venturing in to Kubernetes.