The International Binder Federation

About two years ago, the Binder project evolved into the community led project that it is today. The deployment at mybinder.org was upgraded to use
BinderHub, a scalable open-source web application that runs on Kubernetes and provides free, sharable, interactive computing environments to people
all around the world.

In the ensuing years, the Binder community has grown considerably.
Now people use the public deployment at mybinder.org around 100,000 times each week, and there are around 8,000 unique repositories compatible with Binder. Binder links now work with multiple repository providers, such as GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, and even Zenodo! This means that providing enough compute power for everyone is a challenge.

This is why today we are happy to announce that mybinder.org is now backed by two clusters hosted by two different cloud providers: Google Cloud and OVH. This is the beginning of the International Binder Federation.

How did we get here? Alongside mybinder.org’s growth we’ve seen growth in another part of the Binder ecosystem: people deploying a BinderHub for their own groups. In the last year, we have seen BinderHubs deployed for large-scale earth analytics with the Pangeo project, for communities of best-practices in open science with The Turing Way, and for specific domains such as the social sciences like GESIS.

As more BinderHubs are deployed, we realized that there was an opportunity to leverage the strengths and resources of the community to improve the large, public BinderHub deployment at mybinder.org. Instead of a single BinderHub run by the Binder team, we could build a network of BinderHubs that shares the load and keeps mybinder.org stable and quick.

OVH Joins the mybinder.org Federation

Today, we are thrilled to announce that the Binder Project now has a world-wide federation of BinderHubs powering mybinder.org. We’ve partnered with OVH, a cloud hosting company based in Europe that is supportive of open projects such as Jupyter and Binder.

Through the partnership with OVH, all traffic to mybinder.org will now be split between two BinderHubs - one run by the Binder team, and another run by a team of open-source advocates at OVH. They have generously offered their resources and computing time to allow Binder to serve the scientific and educational communities.

The mybinder.org federation currently has two BinderHubs, but this network can (and will!) grow as more groups offer to connect their own BinderHubs to the network.

What does this mean?

So what has changed for you, the user? Probably not much. The
biggest difference you’ll notice is that landing at mybinder.org
will now redirect you to one of two places:

• gke.mybinder.org is the BinderHub hosted on the Google Cloud Platform
• ovh.mybinder.org is the BinderHub hosted on the OVH platform in France.

Other than this, your experience should be the same. You might even notice an improvement in speed and load times because the BinderHub you’re using has a little bit less traffic on it 😀.

As always, we are pushing this out as soon as we think it is useful. You can help us to scale this model and make it rock solid by reporting weird things you notice. Expect tweaks over the next few weeks based on feedback from users. Let us know about the things you like, dislike or have questions about at https://discourse.jupyter.org/t/the-binder-federation/1286.

Why is this a big deal?

We think that having a federation of BinderHubs behind mybinder.org is pretty cool, for a few different reasons. First, it demonstrates the dedication that the Binder community has towards building tools that anybody can deploy — we certainly don’t want to be the only ones running a BinderHub, and having other BinderHubs behind mybinder.org is a great example of this. Second, a network of BinderHubs for mybinder.org means that we can eventually do some clever things like use geolocation to distribute users, which should improve the performance that you all experience. Third, having fewer users per BinderHub means that we can optimize the resources available to each hub — resulting in improvements in speed and stability. Finally, having a federation of BinderHubs makes the mybinder.org service significantly more robust, and less-dependent on a single team, deployment, platform, and funding source. We are now more confident than ever that mybinder.org will continue to be available as a stable, free, public service that keeps growing.

What’s next?

Now that we’ve reached N=2 BinderHubs powering mybinder.org,
it is straightforward for us to grow this network to N=3 and beyond. Over the summer we will continue our work on approaching universities, research councils, and cloud hosting companies.

If you are interested in helping out: we’d love to see other community members come forward to offer their time or resources to provide more nodes in the international BinderHub federation. If you’re interested in doing so, please open an issue in the JupyterHub team compass repository
to discuss the possibilities of working together!

We’re excited about the ability for the Binder community continuing
to grow, and to build more tools for distributed, community-run
infrastructure for open science and education. This is all possible
because of the hard work of many people in the community, so a big
thank you to those who spend their time working on open tools in
the Jupyter and Binder ecosystems. We’re excited to see what comes
next!