Deploying JupyterHub for students and researchers

Description

JupyterHub, a multiuser server for Jupyter notebooks, enables you to offer a notebook server to everyone in a group—which is particularly useful when teaching a course, as students no longer need to install software on their laptops. Min Ragan-Kelley, Carol Willing, Yuvi Panda, and Ryan Lovett get you started deploying and customizing JupyterHub for your needs.

Min, Carol, Yuvi, and Ryan explore JupyterHub’s architecture and how to assemble a deployment exactly the way you want it. They then walk you through a complete deployment of JupyterHub with Kubernetes following best practices learned from the campus-wide deployment at UC Berkeley, including integration with campus authentication (via Google OAuth), status monitoring and data collection with statsd, and automating as much of the deployment and maintenance process as possible. Along the way, Min, Carol, Yuvi, and Ryan demonstrate how development, testing, and production systems can be easily managed to increase reliability and scaling of the deployment and how to customize your components (authenticators, spawners) and provide examples of services that can be managed by or interact with the hub and its users. You’ll then create a simple, functioning JupyterHub deployment of your own.

Topics include:

• Authenticators that allow JupyterHub to integrate with any existing authentication system, such as GitHub or Google OAuth, PAM, and LDAP
• Spawners, which are used to run notebook servers on any system for spawning processes, such as Docker, Kubernetes, or local processes
• Proxies
• Services

Outline

JupyterHub overview

• Getting started with JupyterHub
• Composing a deployment
  • What parts can I choose from? (Authenticator, spawner, proxy, single-user server image (if applicable))
  • How can I put them together?
• Composing the simplest possible working deployment
• Swapping out various parts from the simplest deployment
  • Using and configuring a different authenticator
  • Using and configuring a different spawner

Putting together a deployment of JupyterHub with Kubernetes

• Background: Getting started with Kubernetes
• Basic concepts
  • A mental model for working with Kubernetes
  • Pods, deployments, and services
  • Persistent volumes and cloud providers
  • Where to learn more (lecture series, books, wonderful tutorials, etc.)
• Safely deploying JupyterHub by using standard release engineering practices
  • Deploying and upgrading a JupyterHub with helm
• Building your own user images
• How to debug your deployment when things inevitably go wrong

Appendix: More customization

• Subclassing in jupyterhub_config.py for fun and profit
• Writing your own authenticator
• Writing your own spawner