The BinderHub Federation#

While it may seem like mybinder.org is a single website, it is in fact a federation of teams that deploy public BinderHubs to serve the community. This page lists the BinderHubs that currently help power mybinder.org.

Visiting mybinder.org will randomly redirect you to one of the following BinderHubs.

Join the Federation!

If your organization is interested in becoming part of the BinderHub federation, check out Joining the BinderHub Federation.

Members of the BinderHub Federation#

Below is a list of the current member hubs in the BinderHub Federation:

ovh.mybinder.org

notebooks.gesis.org/binder

binder.curvenote.dev

Joining the BinderHub Federation#

Behind mybinder.org is a federation of BinderHubs. This means that there are several independent hubs that each serve a fraction of the traffic created by people clicking links pointing to mybinder.org. Anyone (a company, university or individual) is welcome to deploy a BinderHub that forms part of the federation.

Adding a new BinderHub to the federation requires a mix of two kinds of resources: compute and human power to operate the hub. The two extremes of this mixture are:

  • You donate compute power that the mybinder.org team has full control over, which means you don’t have to be involved in day to day operations

  • You donate compute power over which the mybinder.org team does not have full control which means you are also responsible for day to day operations of the BinderHub.

Things to consider when deciding to join the Binder federation#

If you’re interested in joining the federation of BinderHubs, consider the following questions:

  1. How much time will this take? Answering this question depends largely on how comfortable you are deploying and maintaining your own BinderHub. If you are fairly comfortable, it won’t take much time. Otherwise, it may be a good idea to gain some experience in running a BinderHub first - perhaps by helping with the mybinder.org deployment!

  2. Is there any kind of service agreement? Not really. We expect that any member of the BinderHub federation will be committed to keeping their BinderHub running with a reasonable uptime, but we don’t have any legal framework to enforce this. Use your best judgment when deciding if you’d like to join the BinderHub federation - if you can confidently say your BinderHub will be up the large majority of the time, then that’s fine.

  3. What kind of cloud resources would I need? This depends on how many you have :-) We can increase or decrease the percentage of mybinder.org traffic that goes to your BinderHub based on what you can handle.

  4. What are the minimal responsibilities I would be expected to carry out? This depends a bit on whether you are providing compute power that the mybinder.org team has full access to or not. See What are the minimal responsibilities of being a Federation member? for more info.

  5. I’m still interested, what should I do next to join? If you’d still like to join the BinderHub federation, see How to join the BinderHub Federation.

What are the minimal responsibilities of being a Federation member?#

Here is a list of activities that you could expect to occasionally participate in as a member of the BinderHub Federation. This list is designed to be unobtrusive and respectful of people’s volunteered time. These activities are more important if you are donating compute power which the mybinder.org team do not have full control over.

  • Introduce yourself in the discourse forum or gitter chat! The team love to get to know the people we collaborate with :-)

  • Watch the team-compass for any relevant updates or opportunities for participation.

  • Attend the monthly team meetings when able. This does not have to be every month since the provided link also contains a monthly report archive for missed meetings.

  • Be available in the mybinder.org-deploy gitter chat to liaise with the mybinder.org team should the cluster experience any technical difficulties.

  • Be willing to co-work/pair programme with the mybinder.org team to debug any issues with the cluster.

How to join the BinderHub Federation#

If you’ve read through Things to consider when deciding to join the Binder federation and What are the minimal responsibilities of being a Federation member? and would like to join the BinderHub federation, please reach out to the Binder team by opening an issue at the mybinder.org repository <https://github.com/jupyterhub/mybinder.org-deploy>_. Mention that you’d like to join the federation, what kind of computational resources you have, and what kind of human resources you have for maintaining the BinderHub deployment.

The next step is for you to tell us where your BinderHub lives. We’ll assign a sub-domain of mybinder.org (e.g. ovh.mybinder.org) that points to your BinderHub. Finally, we’ll change the routing configuration so that some percentage of traffic to mybinder.org is directed to your BinderHub! The last step is to tell everybody how awesome you are, and to add your deployment to Members of the BinderHub Federation page.

The BinderHub Federation FAQ#

Can I deploy a BinderHub both for the federation and for my own community?#

Yes! BinderHub can be deployed either as a public service (such as at mybinder.org), or for a more restricted community. Serving a smaller community means you can expose users to more resources or allow access to privileged data.

If you’d like to both serve a more specific population of users and support the public mybinder.org federation, we recommend running two BinderHubs in parallel with one another. You can do this on the same Kubernets cluster if you wish, and you’d configure each BinderHub according to the resources and access that you want to provide.

Who is currently in the BinderHub federation?#

The current list of BinderHubs that are contributing to mybinder.org can be found at Members of the BinderHub Federation.

Does the BinderHub federation share Docker images?#

Currently, the federation does not share Docker images for repositories. This means that you might have to build your repository a few times (one for each BinderHub that serves your images). We know that this adds some extra waiting for many folks, and if you have any suggestions for how we can speed up this process please open an issue in the BinderHub repository!