# Yuvi's MyBinder SciPy proposal

## Titles

1. What's going on with mybinder.org? Let's find out!
2. How mybinder.org has been and can be valuble to open science communities: Open Infrastructure as a Service
3. The past, present and possible futures of mybinder.org
4. Towards a more sustainable and reliable mybinder.org (current preferred title)

**CH suggested title**: "How an open and vendor-agnostic cloud ecosystem helps Binder be faster and more efficient"

## What do I want to communicate?

1. mybinder.org has been helpful to the scientific python and open science ecosystem in many ways since it started. For example:
1. Workshops and trainings
2. Complex demos with the click of a button
3. Easily testing PRs
2. It's also open infrastructure, run by a small group of volunteers
3. You may have felt it's not as solid as it used to be. Is that true?
4. Talk about the past, cost of compute, reliance on donations from large cloud providers in the past
5. Talk about new changes now
1. Hetzner (steal from blog post)
2. Other universities / large number of small donations
3. Primary changes - compute itself is cheaper now, even if not at major cloud providers
6. Talk about how you can get involved, and long term paths to sustainability

## Abstract (100 words)

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.

## Description (500 words)

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:

1. What is mybinder.org? Why should I care?
2. What does it mean to run 'open infrastructure'? How is that different from 'open source'?
3. 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?
4. 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?
5. 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?
6. Ok that's all fine, what is happening now to improve the sustainability situation?
7. The new UI on mybinder.org looks nice! How did that happen? Are we getting more new features?
8. I can see why a reliable and sustainable mybinder.org serves an important purpose in the scientific python ecosystem. How can I help?

----

- running a massively available public cloud service requires time and resources
- For a fully volunteer project like mybinder.org, these are limited, which has resulted in stability issues.
- Something about social structure of volunteers who handle this and the pros and cons.
- But Binder has made a bet that using open, cloud-agnostic infrastructure will help us deploy the best service with these limited resources.
- This talk is about one example of that bet paying off.
- There have been advances in Kubernetes ecosystem. (k3s and general stability)
- There have been advances in image building ecosystem. (buildkit)
- (optional if helpful) There have been advances in managed object storage
- There has been continued growth in managed infrastructure offerings that take advantage of these things (Hetzner)
- Binder used ___ and ___ of these advances to improve ___ and ___, which will result in ___ benefits to our users.
- Go into as much detail as you think is interesting to a group of technical attendees.
- what's the future? What other exciting things do you see coming in the cloud space? Where else do you see low-hanging fruit?
- what can you do to help? Call to action for supporting Binder with $$, infra, time, and ways to get involved in the community.

## Session Image