JupyterHub Binder deployment strategies on AWS

Notes for deploying JupyterHub/Binder on AWS

What is JupyterHub and Chosing a Distribution for Deployment on AWS

(https://jupyter.org/hub ; https://tljh.jupyter.org/en/latest/topic/whentouse.html#topic-whentouse)

What is JupyterHub and key features of JupyterHub can be found at the first link above.

Information about distributions of JupyterHub and choosing a distrubution of JupyterHub can be found and the first and second link above.

There are two distributions: Kubernetes and Littlest

1. Kubernetes -

• allows JupyterHub to scale to many thousands of users
• can flexibly grow/shrink the size of resources it needs
• uses container technology (Docker) in administering user sessions
• allows users to interact with a computing environment through a webpage - makes it is easy to provide and standardize the computing environment of a group of people

2. Littlest -

• also known as The Littlest JupyterHub (TLJH)
• an opinionated and pre-configured distribution to deploy a JupyterHub on a single virtual machine (in the cloud or on your own hardware)
• designed to be a more lightweight and maintainable solution for use-cases where size, scalability, and cost-savings are not a huge concern
• distribution for a small (0-100) number of users

Although we are testing with 1-5 users, we are chosing Kubernetes deployment because we are spreading users on a cluster of smaller machines that are scaled up or down, and we need to be able to run containers (docker or singularity). This will also allow us to scale up users as needed.