Plan for migration to 1.0

[simsong]

Given the significant problems I've had with the SAM migration, this discussion documents the current state of the web app, the problems, and suggests a way forward.

Current State

1. Web app runs under Zappa with Bottle but not under SAM. Problems with this approach include:

• Zappa and Bottle are not well-maintained
• Zappa requires 250MB of data to be downloaded from an S3 bucket on start, which causes the slow start.
• Debugging is hard.

2. Metadata stored on Dreamhost in Simson's MySQL Server.
   Problems with this approach:

• Dependent on Simson
• MySQL is expensive on Amazon

3. Movie data stored in S3

Current State of Dev

• App has been ported to SAM and Flask.
  • Running with "Image" mode, not Zipfile, due to size.
  • Image requires functioning docker, which is finicky on MacOS
• Movies stored in S3 or MySQL (largely for testing)
• Many features do not work.
• Debugging is hard.
• Dev has no pylint errors
• Dev has no test errors locally or on GitHub with Actions
• UI in pure JQuery

(New) Proposed End State and development path

0.8 release on Micro VM:

• Movies stored in S3.
• App running under Flask
• Spin up Flask application running on a micro-VM at AWS so we have at least something operational.
• Extend all tests so that they can test a remote endpoint, to test an operational system
• Demonstrate tracking with 200MB plant videos
• Implement downsampling of HD videos to 480x680

0.9 release on Lambda:

• Remove the ffmpeg executable from the distribution (significantly reducing size). Instead, when ffmpeg is needed, the application downloads it from a well-known source. This makes it easier to deploy and debug. This alone may make it possible to move from Image/Dockerer to Zipfile on Lambda.

1.0 release on Lambda without MySQL integration:

• Create the ability to store movies locally on the server in the file system (won't work for Lambda, but will work for micro VM and for testing.)
• Metadata stored in DynamoDB
• Remove the ability to store movies in MySQL to simplify code size
• Remove MySQL functionality, as it increases code size and makes code paths and testing more complicated.

1.1 release:

• Migrate UI to React
• Migrate from JavaScript to TypeScript