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.

Note

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

Members of the BinderHub Federation

Here is a list of the current members of the BinderHub federation:


gke.mybinder.org


Run by

The Binder Team


Funded by

Google Cloud Platform


ovh.mybinder.org


Run by

The OVH Team


Funded by

OVH


gesis.mybinder.org


Run by

The GESIS Notebooks Team


Funded by

GESIS

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. 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.

How to join the BinderHub Federation

If you’ve read through Things to consider when deciding to join the Binder federation and would like to join the BinderHub federation, please reach out to the Binder team by opening an issue at the mybinder.org repository. 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!