Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) joins the mybinder.org federation in partnership with 2i2c

The Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) is the birthplace of the current iteration of mybinder.org, all the way back in 2017. In 2026, they are back as a member of the federation, joining 2i2c and GESIS in contributing to the cloud costs of keeping mybinder.org running!

The BIDS node is running on the OVH Cloud Provider, joining the two existing nodes (from 2i2c and GESIS) running on Hetzner. By running on a different cloud provider than our existing nodes, we reduce the risk that a cloud provider outage or policy change will take down the entire mybinder.org service. This immediately came into play, as Hetzner is having a lot of trouble with its object storage service, increasing failure rates on mybinder.org. We were able to shift more of our users to the BIDS node seamlessly, reducing disruptions for our end users.

The BIDS node thus temporarily served 50% of our traffic, taking a higher than usual share of the load as we wait for error rates on Hetzner object store to get better. It has served more than 64,000 users so far in the short time it’s been up, and expected to do more.

Graph of mybinder.org sessions across our federation members over the last 4 months, showing the BIDS member taking on more of the load over time as it is brought online. The graph is jagged due to dips in demand over the weekend

This node was brought up in partnership with 2i2c. 2i2c contributed expertise in extending the mybinder.org deployment infrastructure to run on OVH, as well as working with UC Berkeley procurement to ensure that the cloud costs can be paid for on a continuous basis. Many thanks to the ever awesome MinRK (who is now back to working at BIDS!) for a lot of the technical work in taking this through!

Want your organization to join the mybinder.org federation, materially making a difference in resilience and availability of the service, even at just a few hundred dollars a month? Come talk to us on the Jupyter Zulip!