Impact report from 2i2c's Binder federation instance

The mybinder.org service provides reproducible and interactive computational environments for the open science community. It is financially supported by a federation of BinderHubs. 2i2c is part of the team that manages mybinder.org, and we’re committed to supporting this critical infrastructure for open science and reproducibility.

We developed a more cost-efficient process for deploying BinderHub on a single VM and are now running a BinderHub at 2i2c.mybinder.org. This post highlights the impact we’ve had through our support of the mybinder.org federation, we’ll update it periodically.

Usage over time #

In Q1 of 2025, 2i2c.mybinder.org launched 417,048 reproducible sessions. In this time, mybinder.org was primarily driven by our new Hetzner node as we worked with GESIS to stabilize their own BinderHub instance.

In Q2 of 2025, 2i2c.mybinder.org launched 249,750 reproducible sessions. In this time, we worked with GESIS to deploy their BinderHub instance on the same Hetzner node setup, which let us distribute more of Binder’s load onto them.

Where we’ve made improvements #

As part of this effort, we’ve made several improvements to the Binder and JupyterHub ecosystem. Here are a few links where you can read more:

• Deploying BinderHub on a single VM with k3s - Our approach to making BinderHub deployment cheaper and simpler
• Hetzner cloud infrastructure experience - Cost-effective cloud hosting for mybinder.org
• Combating TCP scanning abuse on mybinder.org - Developing anti-abuse tools to prevent an abuse use-case.
• Improving Binder’s usage dashboard - This helps us create posts like these and is useful to others as well.
• Integrating BinderHub with JupyterHub - Working with GESIS to bring Binder’s dynamic image building capabilities to persistent JupyterHubs, empowering users to manage their own environments

Acknowledgements #

This work is made possible by:

• GESIS for their continued support as mybinder.org federation members
• The JupyterHub community for collaboration and support
• Our member communities whose fees support this work