The Open edX Koa release is the 11th release of the Open edX platform and includes several updates for architecture and code. 

The Koa release basically is not feature-based but rather date-based:

• 28 September - community testing of the master branches, on a best effort basis
• 09 November - creation of the open-release/koa.master branch and the open-release/koa.alpha1 tag
• 09 December - Koa release

Installation and Operations updates

Installation

For successful deployment of the Open edx Koa release and support over a hundred registered students on a single server, users must adhere to the core technology guidelines. The release is planned to be used only for Ubuntu 20.04 amd64 and for Django 3.0, possibly even for Django 3.1.

For more information on how to install the release from scratch and how to prepare the server, refer to the Open edX Native Installation.

Service upgrades

The new updates of the Open edx Koa include upgrading MySQL 5.6 to 5.7 and some changes for Juniper users. 

Koa will still run Elasticsearch 1.5.2. The new upgrade has been cancelled for now and scheduled for the next release of Open edx - Lilac. 

To reset versions of various services from the native installation was developed a new script - evrsion.py 

Impact on Code

The Django app plugins were moved from edx/edx-platform into edx/edx-django-utils. 

The LinkedIn Add to Profile Certificate API has been updated. This change will allow for the Add to Profile for certificates to autofill the form and if your Company Identifier is defined, it will link to your LinkedIn page.

In the new release, it will be necessary to transfer the settings from boto to boto3 as boto was removed from the requirements.

Deprecations and Removals updates

The new release replaced the Django server-side rendering frontend implementation with a React-based micro-interface.

XQueue Watcher successfully used for several years instead of XServer, so in Koa release, it will be necessary to remove XServer from the frameworks. The ID verification process is now served by new pages in the MFE frontend-app-account. 

Discussions are underway to ditch the old edx id validation user interface and remove the code from this codebase.

It's all news for today, and of course, we're going to update this blog post after Koa's final release this winter. Stay in touch!

Reference:

Open edX Release Planning

Koa Native Open edX platform Installation