Juniper dependencies - frameworks, DBs etc

Hi,

I’m working with company looking at making a significant shift from Ficus to Juniper over the coming months. To help with planning could someone tell / point me to:

Requirements / Dependencies
What is needed/changed here (c.f. Ficus or Ironwood)? Django 2.2 & Python 3 are a given but are there other changes in terms on minimum / recommended versions etc to be aware of. For DBs (MySQl/Maria, Mongo) what is required?

Hosting Sizing
Having played with Tutor (https://docs.tutor.overhang.io/) on AWS for Ironwood and Juniper, for testing only, my impression is that memory requirements have gone up? This might be specific to Tutor and the Docker overhead but previously I could spin up Tutor (LMS+Studio) on a t3.large (8GB) quite happily. For Juniper I found I needed a xlarge (16GB) otherwise it hung with endless paging.

To look at it another way the rule of thumb I’ve seen and followed was about 200 active users on a t3.large instance. Is it reasonable to stick with this?

Benefits of Juniper (and Ironwood/Hawthorn/Ginko)
I’m trying to assemble a list of the major feature deltas between Ficus and Juniper. This is largely to convince various people this effort is worthwhile. The obvious answer is to say ‘we have to as Python 2 is EOL, we are on a very old unsupported version etc’. However I wanted to give some carrot as well as stick in terms of major enhancements.

I see the release notes link here: https://edx.readthedocs.io/projects/edx-developer-docs/en/latest/named_releases.html

However a) the Juniper list isn’t there yet? b) as a relative novice on Open Ed X it’s quite hard for me to get a feel for what the biggest benefits this jump from Ficus -> Juniper would bring. If someone who knows them well can give me a few headline benefits or point to resources that outline that would be hugely helpful.

Thanks very much

Richard

@Rick You might already have seen it in the meantime, but the release notes for Juniper have since been published - see:

https://edx.readthedocs.io/projects/open-edx-release-notes/en/latest/juniper.html

For upgrade instructions, there is currently an effort lead by @regis to produce them - they should likely answer most of your questions then.

https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/COMM/pages/1488977937/Juniper+Upgrade+instructions+WIP

You can follow the progress on this task on the community board:

Trello

Thanks that is very helpful!