07-10, 15:00–15:30 (US/Pacific), Room 317
mybinder.org has served millions of scientific python users for 8 years now! It is an experiment in running open source infrastructure as a public good. Sustainability challenges faced by open source software production are magnified here - we need people time to manage the infrastructure, pay for computational infrastructure required to run the service, operate it reliably by responding to outages in a timely fashion, and fight off abuse from malicious actors. This talk covers the lessons learnt over the years, and new community oriented experiments to better sustainability, functionality & reliability that we are trying out now.
mybinder.org allows users to get a custom interactive computing environment in their browser via simply clicking a link, allowing them to explore various materials without having to go through the laborious process of setting up a local environment exactly right. It is fully open to the public, allowing anyone to create and share links without requiring logins or payment. mybinder.org has now served millions of users in the scientific python community over the last 8 years. As an open source infrastructure project, it's also had several challenges in sustainability and reliability that has manifested in users receiving poorer service some of the time. This talk aims to go over some of those challenges, how they manifest for users, and new experiments (technical and social) for addressing these. Here's a rough outline of various questions you will have better answers to at the end of this talk:
- What is mybinder.org? Why should I care?
- What does it mean to run 'open infrastructure'? How is that different from 'open source'?
- When I click a mybinder.org link, it just sometimes hangs. What are the complex social factors beyond my control that have led me to this frustrating moment in time?
- So what happens when we can no longer rely on big huge corporations to give open source projects free cloud credits out of the goodness of their hearts?
- As open infrastructure, mybinder.org made a bet on using open source cloud agnostic technology (kubernetes) very early on, putting effort into not being locked into any specific cloud provider. Has that helped mybinder.org survive or made things worse?
- Ok that's all fine, what is happening now to improve the sustainability situation?
- The new UI on mybinder.org looks nice! How did that happen? Are we getting more new features?
- I can see why a reliable and sustainable mybinder.org serves an important purpose in the scientific python ecosystem. How can I help?
