Thank you everyone who joined the May 2025 Round-up call! The call featured Stock management workflows presentation by the Muso team, a discussion on failure modes in the CHT and CHT doc site updates.
Below are highlights from the call.
1. Leveraging CHT capabilities to support inventory management in Mali.
2. Discussion about the failure Modes in the CHT.
Over the past months, a few projects have reported challenges in maintaining their CHT deployments. The goal of this session was for community members to share these experiences and destigmatize CHT failures.
a) App outage experienced by one of the CHT projects.
In quarter 1, one of the CHT deployments experienced a downtime which resulted in some of the instances going down save for 1 instance which was being hosted at a different cloud environment. Investigation into the issue indicated that the downtime was caused by many issues including increase in data that the data center could not handle. By then, the technical team had also not set up a robust uptime monitoring system which would notify them in case of any technical issues. Luckily, the team had set up passive back-ups. It took a long time for them to spin up new instances and route traffic to these instances. During the downtime period, users were not able to access the app which significantly affected the work that the CHWs were doing. Based on this experience, the team recommends that: CHT deployments should set up active-active back-up which would facilitate faster recovery should there be a situation where the primary site goes down and have a development and deployment quality index to inform users about the quality of the application they are using. This metric could be based on tests run on the code and back-ups. There is also a need to work together as a community to improve on how intensive disk operations are handled by couchdb.
b) Muso Mali project migration experience.
A few months ago, the MUSO project migrated the hosting of the app from AWS to Google Cloud Platform self hosting account. For such a deployment which has a multi-node couchdb set up, the namespace is usually in the metadata and node. So if you move data from one server to another, it is recommended that you follow the required naming convention or modify the data by removing the old namespace in the node. During the MUSO app migration, the team ran into technical issues because they did not implement the required changes based on the current clustering. The issues were resolved through namespace alignment and modification of metadata.
Thank you all for sharing these challenges and insightful lessons with the community. These struggles and needs from these projects have helped us to learn how we can keep our project disaster recovery plans up to date.
3. CHT documentation site updates
There is a new theme (Hextra) that has been added to the existing documentation site as an upgrade to the Dosy theme which now gives the doc site a new look. Also a number of pages have been updated to take advantage of the features in the new theme. A doc site update forum post that details the doc site improvements and new features is live, please read through and share your feedback. You can access the doc site here, an archive of the old site has been set up to enable community members to compare the two sites.
4. Community Announcements.
We have the following upcoming community events:
- Community meet-up on May 20, 2025 at 4-5 pm GMT.
- CHT Dev Hour on May 22, 2025 at 1-2 pm GMT.
- The June Round-up will be on June 12, 2025 at 1-2 pm GMT.
We look forward to your participation and engagement, you can also follow these instructions to subscribe and stay connected to CHT community events.