Don't link to mybinder.org clusters directly

[betatim]

Hi 👋 !

nice work with the template! I just wanted to stop by to let you know that we don't want people using the individual instances of mybinder.org directly (gke.mybinder.org and ovh.mybinder.org). The reason for this is that we might rename the instances or take one of them offline without notice for maintenance. If you link to mybinder.org we will redirect users to the best available cluster.

[matheusmota]

Hi @betatim. Thanks for reaching us out.
I understood your point, it makes sense. We'll be removing direct links.
We have been using this strategy on the badges to avoid reaching a federated instance in which the image is not built already. But ok, loading balancing between the federated instances is certainly better.

Please let us know if there is anything else we could do to help mybinder.
Thanks again and congrats to you and the team for the outstanding job with repo2docker/binderhub/mybinder.

[betatim]

We are working on smarter routing to each of the clusters and within a cluster. Take a look at jupyterhub/mybinder.org-deploy#1066. Help with that would be super welcome. I think the first step would be a bit of prototyping to figure out what the edge cases are, components/inputs that are need (for example "how busy is cluster A?" seems like a metric we'd need) and then implementing it "for real".

It makes sense to use a hack like linking directly to one cluster to try and avoid rebuilding but it has the downside that if we move the cluster or it is unhealthy the link will be broken. Hopefully improvements to the routing will remove the need for the hack :)

[betatim]

Hey,

a heads up from our side: we have implemented the load balancing a few weeks ago. This means a particular repo always gets assigned to the same cluster (if that cluster has space).

[matheusmota]

That is great news, Tim! Thanks for letting us know.