2024-05-31 Sys Ops & Management SIG Agenda and Meeting notes

Dear folks,

The Formalization Subgroup of the FOLIO Tri-Council is currently surveying the opinion of the Community about how we want to proceed with introducing the new Eureka Platform into the Project.

See Folio Eureka Platform Overview.

They have asked me to survey the opinion of the system administrators or people responsible for hosting the system. We and the Techincal Council will be the key informants of their survey.

So the question is, where do we, where does the FOLIO community collectively intend to go ?

To say that much in advance:

• I don't think this is about a collective "No" of the Community to Eureka. This will not be an option. It's about the how and when it will be introduced.

I imagine that we find answers to the following questions:

1. Shall the Project support both platforms (Okapi, Eureka) perpetually ?
2. Shall the Project move from Okapi to Eureka after some time of an overlap ? How long should that overlap period be ?
3. Do you / your institution understand the reasons why Eureka has been made up ? Do you understand the benefits ?
4. Do you / does your institution understand the implications of the Switch (Okapi → Eureka) ? If not, approximately how much time do you expect to need to sufficiently understand the implications (technically) ?
5. If your institution plans or wants to stay with Okapi for a long time (say at least for 3 years), what are the reasons ?
   1. your own Ressources
   2. Lack of (local, i.e. your) requirements (e.g. towards system security, performance)
   3. Distrust in (some of the) new Components, e.g. maybe distrust that Kong remains OpenSource, that Kong might not support FOLIO forever
   4. Lack of support or documentation
   5. Fear to lose clients; fear that clients don't understand the change because they won't see a change
   6. Want to use software made (and supported) by Index Data
   7. others
6. Does your institution already have a timetable for a Switch to the Eureka platform ? If yes, what time scale are we talking about, approximately ?
   1. Can your institution in the first place make a decision whether they would like to change the platform or not right now ? If not, how much time do you expect to need in order to be able to make a decision ? What information is missing in order for you to make a decision ?
7. Do you think that Eureka will introduce a larger complexity into your hosted system ?
   1. If yes, do you think this will only be in the initial, implementation stage or will it remain to be more complex ?
   2. Do you expect that system maintainance will eventually become easier with Eureka ? (compared to your current setup)
8. Do we expect a performance improvement by replacing Okapi with Kong + Sidecars ?
   1. if not, what other positive aspects do we see in replacing Okapi by Kong + Sidecars ?
   2. do we see negative aspects ?
9. Have you thought about migration (of your production systems) from Okapi to Eureka ?
   
   1. How much concern does that raise in your mind ?
   2. Do you consider this particularly difficult ? More difficult than the platform switch itself (without any production data) ?
10. How much effort do you think it will be to migrate permissions and authorizations ?
11. How problematic do we see the close ties to Kubernetes which seem to be enfored by the employment of Sidecars (and Keycloak) ?
    1. Can we think of running FOLIO (in production) in a non-Kubernetes based environment now or in the future ? If yes, what will be the implications for a switch to Eureka now ?
12. Do we still need an installation documentation for a Single Server (single VM) ?
    1. if yes, what would that look like for an Eureka-based system ? What environment would need to run on that VM ?
    2. if not, what will replace it ? Will we have a step-by-step installation documentation on a K8s-Cluster ? If yes, who will maintain that ?
13. Do we still want to have a Vagrant box for demo and development purposes  ?
14. Which other specific concerns do Sys Ops have when they think about the switch from Okapi to Eureka ?

Some questions that I have (probably to Index Data):

What exactly will it mean: "the support for Okapi will end" (if it will).

• Doesn't Index Data use Okapi also for other prodcuts (I remember it was there before FOLIO) ? So wouldn't they continue supporting it at least by security patches ?
• Or does it rather mean that at some point of time there will be (new? changed?) FOLIO applications that can not be deployed with Okapi anymore (if so, what could be the reason for that, technically?). What does this mean exactly ? Are we talking about the manager applications (I won't need those if I use Okapi for enablement and dependency resolution) ?