Service-Enhancements

We’ve completed a major round of infrastructure upgrades across all 2i2c-managed hubs - every hub is now running Kubernetes 1.34 and Z2JH helm chart 4.3.3. Running up-to-date versions of both Kubernetes and the JupyterHub helm chart ensures that our communities get the best support and reliability, both in terms of features and security.

Our collaborators at NASA VEDA recently asked us about the rationale behind policies for upgrading our infrastructure relatively quickly when new versions come out. Here’s the explanation that we shared with them, in case it’s useful for others as well.

We recently enabled CloudBank to run Terraform changes for their cluster without needing to wait on 2i2c engineers for each request. They run 50+ hubs for various community colleges, and we want to enable them to self serve as much of that as possible.

This year we’ve prioritized making the cloud safe to try for our member communities. This has driven work in monitoring, alerting, and automating infrastructure so that we resolve small problems before they become big problems.

Storage quotas help users avoid running out of space unexpectedly and give administrators visibility into capacity planning. However, storage usage can change rapidly, and it’s important to have quick information so that administrators know whether they are close to hitting limits.

We are excited to announce that we have extended our cloud cost dashboards to support display costs filtered by user groups using Grafana! This new feature allows administrators to monitor and manage cloud expenses based on user group memberships in JupyterHub.

We are excited to announce that dashboards to monitor cloud usage and costs at a per-user level are now available! See the cost monitoring documentation for more information. A key goal of 2i2c is to make the cloud safe for science.

One of 2i2c’s goals is to make the cloud safe for science. A big part of this is making the black box of commercial cloud infrastructure more predictable and reliable for our member communities, across our network of community hubs that all operate autonomously.

We’ve been working to reduce the base costs of running our cloud infrastructure on AWS by switching to more efficient instance types for our core nodes. This is the core infrastructure we use to ensure hubs are “always available” for users, even when no one is actively using a hub.

On August 29, 2025 our cloud infrastructure team experienced an incident with the UC Merced community hub when students tried to login simultaneously at the start of class. For more detailed technical information about this incident, see our full incident report.