Hosting & Infrastructure

Hosting & Infrastructure covers the operational layer of Open edX — deployment tooling, database and cache configuration, Celery task queues, storage (S3), CDN, monitoring, and scaling. This is the domain of platform operators and DevOps engineers.

The Open edX community has standardized around [Tutor](https://github.com/overhangio/tutor) (maintained by Edly/overhangio, *not* in the openedx org) for Docker-based deployment. Tutor replaced the earlier `configuration` repo (Ansible-based) as the primary deployment mechanism.

• Tutor: Docker Compose / Kubernetes-based deployment; the dominant deployment approach in the community; managed via `tutor config` and Tutor plugins

• Databases: MySQL for relational data; MongoDB for course content; Redis for Celery broker and caching; Elasticsearch for search

• Celery: Background task processing via Celery with Redis or RabbitMQ as broker; used for email, report generation, grade computation

• Storage: Static assets and user uploads typically stored in S3-compatible object storage

• CDN: Video and static assets served via CDN (CloudFront or equivalent)

• Monitoring: Prometheus + Grafana common; `edx-django-utils` provides DataDog/New Relic integration hooks

• Service topology: LMS, Studio, `course-discovery`, `credentials`, `forum`, `ecommerce` (if used) as separate Django services; each with its own database

• Tutor orchestration: Tutor manages service configuration, networking, and deployment; plugins extend the base deployment

• Kubernetes: Tutor supports both `tutor local` (Docker Compose) and `tutor k8s` (Kubernetes) deployment modes

• Codejail: Isolated Python execution for graded problems; runs as a separate container/service with strict sandboxing