🚀 Platform Updates | August 18, 2025

[ashlynn-brown]

🚀 Platform Updates | August 18, 2025

This week we delivered RBAC-first permission APIs, cross-platform resource access, and credits cleanup, plus a smoother Mentor experience (public settings, direct Dropbox training) and hardened ops with XBlock domain overrides and a unified, authenticated healthcheck.

🤖 AI & Mentor Platform

• Richer mentor access patterns: Public mentors can now expose read-only settings, and student profiles are supported in the mentor settings flow, enabling safer, role-aware configuration views.
• Streamlined dataset onboarding: Direct linking for Dropbox dataset training accelerates document ingestion into mentors.
• Clearer user context: Mentors support configurable disclaimers for consistent guidance across tenants.

🗄️ Backend & Platform APIs

RBAC you can bootstrap & query

• Added an RBAC seeding command to populate default roles/groups for new environments.
• New permissions endpoints let clients query RBAC for one or many resources—perfect for gating UI controls and routes.
• Introduced a front-end permission check system, so apps can render capabilities based on server-validated rules.

Cross-platform resource access

• Opt-in patterns to surface resources across platforms, with guardrails for tenant isolation where needed.

Credit hygiene & governance

• Added a credits clean-up endpoint to retire stale balances and keep ledgers healthy.

Catalog & search quality

• Tenant-aware filters and global catalog search were refined for more relevant results across mentors and prompts.

🎓 Open edX Integrations

Mentor XBlock configurability

• New mentor_domain and auth_domain settings at the XBlock level (editable in Studio) with safe fallbacks to global IBL_MENTOR_DOMAIN / IBL_MENTOR_AUTH_DOMAIN.
• Authentication origin now resolves from Django settings for cleaner, more reliable URL handling.

🛡️ DevOps & Observability

Unified health reporting

• A single /healthcheck endpoint returns 200 when healthy and 503 when alerts are firing, including a JSON payload with alert states—ideal for load balancers and uptime checks.

Prometheus hardening

• Web UI secured with basic auth (creds auto-hashed on proxy reload).
• Dedicated prometheus.{BASE_DOMAIN} with auth and a direct redirect to the alerts view.
• Thresholds (CPU, memory, disk) are now fully configurable, with per-node container tracking.

Smoother platform bootstrap

• Compose template volumes consolidated.
• Environment overrides for mentor/auth domains (IBLMENTORDOMAIN, IBLMENTORAUTHDOMAIN), with automatic defaults to SPA domains when not set.