How we run MyBinder.org: A case study in open infrastructure

Description

Thousands of users use MyBinder.org each day, for everything from K–12 education to demonstrating scientific research such as how gravitational waves are detected. Reliability and performance are the core features that give people the confidence to use MyBinder.org. However, running infrastructure is challenging for an open source community. Yuvi Panda shares lessons drawn from the small community that operates MyBinder.org, covering the social and technical processes for keeping MyBinder.org reliable in the most open, transparent, and inclusive way possible, using pretty graphs about the state of MyBinder.org that anyone can see in real time.

Topics include:

• Continuous deployment: Code changes should be fearlessly deployable by large numbers of people of varying skill levels, to prevent bottlenecking resulting from a small number of “roots” or “deployers.” The team at MyBinder.org has built automation around its deployments that let them easily safely deploy changes to the live site minutes after they get merged. Yuvi explains why this is important and how it is done.
• Operational metrics: The team collects and visualizes real-time data from the many layers and components that run MyBinder.org, allowing them to spot anomalies quickly when they occur and do retroactive analysis of outages. Yuvi demos these visualizations and showcases how they can be useful.
• Usage metrics: Authors want to know how many users are using their repositories, and MyBinder.org wants to know how many people are benefiting from the service. However, the team is also aware they need to balance a user’s privacy needs with their need for analytics. Yuvi explores these trade-offs and explains how the team has dealt with them.
• Culture: Building a culture of continuous improvement devoid of “rock star” behavior is key to the long-term sustainability of any operations team. The team does blameless incident reports after every incident, does all its communication in open channels (GitHub, Gitter, etc.), and provides everyone on the team equal infrastructure access. Yuvi talks about why these social processes are far more important than the technical processes and shares some lessons learned.
• Transparency: The team uses public communication channels for everything. The project’s entire infrastructure repository is public, and anyone can propose a deployment. Its detailed cloud compute costs are public. Its real-time operational metrics are public. Anyone can fork MyBinder.org and run their own instance on whichever cloud provider they want. Yuvi explains how the team does this, why it is important, and how you can access these resources.