Reliability

We’ve deployed a new tool to mybinder.org that automatically detects and stops port scanning activity, helping us maintain service reliability while being responsible citizens of the internet. Port scanning is a common part of network-based exploits, and many server hosts prohibit this activity (including Hetzner, where the 2i2c mybinder.

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.

The Problem # Two of our the communities we serve ( NMFS Openscapes and CryoCloud) reported issues with starting GPU nodes on their hubs. Upon investigation, I discovered that the cluster autoscaler seems to not recognize that GPUs were available in the cluster at all suddenly, and hence wasn’t provisioning the nodes.

Chris and Yuvi recently wrote a blog post on the Jupyter blog about a recent experiment to significantly reduce the cost of running a node on the mybinder.org federation. Acknowledgements # Project Pythia provides support for some of our work with the Binder project.

2i2c manages the configuration and deployment of multiple Kubernetes clusters and JupyterHubs from a single open infrastructure repository. This is a challenging problem, as it requires us to centralize information about a number of independent cloud services, and deploy them in an efficient and reliable manner.