BinderHub is out of Beta!
Nearly two years ago, the Binder Project released the beta version
of BinderHub, the technology behind mybinder.org. Since then, mybinder.org has grown to serve nearly 90,000 launches each week and hit the two million launches in a year milestone last year. Over these two years BinderHub has matured as technology and community. Several new organizations now run their own BinderHubs and have joined the community of maintainers.
Today we are proud to announce that we’ve removed the “beta” label from all pages served by BinderHub. BinderHub is now a tool with a track record of working well in production (both at mybinder.org and in other deployments), its general features and API have stabilized, and JupyterHub, the underlying technology that BinderHub uses, is close to its 1.0 release.
A big thank you to all those who have used, commented, advocated, advertised, contributed, maintained and funded this journey. The deployment at mybinder.org is funded with grants from the Moore Foundation and the Google Cloud Platform.
Who else has deployed a BinderHub?
A goal of Project Binder is to build modular, open-source tools that
others can deploy for their own communities. BinderHub, the core technology behind mybinder.org, runs on Kubernetes this means it can be deployed on many cloud providers or even on your own hardware. Over the years, we have seen many new organizations deploy their own BinderHubs. Here are our highlights of other organizations who have joined the BinderHub community.
GESIS were the first to deploy a public BinderHub that is operated independently of mybinder.org. The GESIS BinderHub instance went live
in December 2017 and has been running ever since. They are frequent
contributors to the upstream project. Their BinderHub runs on a bare metal
Kubernetes cluster.
The Pangeo Project instance was the next to come online, launching their
public BinderHub instance in September 2018 (more details in their blog post). They provide additional compute resources and have customized their setup to provide on-demand dask clusters to users. Try out one
of their examples using ocean data. The Pangeo cluster is hosted on Google Kubernetes Engine.
Recently, the Turing Way project has been working on deploying a BinderHub at the Turing Institute in the UK. This BinderHub will serve both internal and external users with the goal of making it easier to share data science projects. They have run several workshops including one that teaches scientists and research software engineers how to deploy their own BinderHub instance. Recently they led a workshop in which ten academics and IT staff deployed their own BinderHub on the Microsoft Azure cloud! Sarah Gibson from their team has recently joined the team that operates mybinder.org.
Finally, the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS) runs a service called Syzygy. It deploys several JupyterHubs and BinderHubs for scientific organizations around Canada. A Binder team recently held a tutorial on deploying Binder and JupyterHub at the PEARC (you can find slides for the talk here). They have also provided a script for deploying JupyterHub (and Binder) on Terraform.
What’s next?
Now that BinderHub is not in beta anymore, what is next? As Project Binder we will focus on adoption, training, and growing the Binder community. This means growing the creation of Binder-ready repositories (repositories that have the necessary structure for Binder to create the environment needed to run the repository’s code). We will increase our outreach and marketing efforts to make sure a diverse audience everywhere around the world knows about Binder.
We will also work on making it easier to setup and operate a public BinderHub no matter what cloud vendor you are using. We are excited to see more organizations deploy their own BinderHubs for their communities. In the coming months, our goal is to create a federation of public BinderHubs
that operate in unison to serve the global user base of mybinder.org.
If this caught your attention consider joining the Binder community, or contributing to Project Binder! A good place to start is the Jupyter Community Forum or dive straight into the code on GitHub.
