The-turing-way: Improvements to zero-to-binderhub workshop

[dalonsoa]

Summary

After going through the instructions of the workshop Zero-to-BinderHub, I have compiled a series of comments. Some are just suggested improvements, others are typos/errors, others are things that might not work as expected, depending on the platform/software used:

What needs to be done?

Suggestions

While the workshop is not intended to be stand-alone material, it will be useful to give a little bit of background information, in particular:

• [x] why it might be useful to create your own BinderHub rather than using mybinder.org, for example. What's the use case for creating your own BinderHub?
• [x] a high level description on what is to be done to have this up and running, i.e., the big picture of the following sections. This is not given even in the BinderHub Docs, except in one brief sentence. What's Kubernetes used for? Why is it needed? And Docker? And JupyterHub (this is the only obvious one)? How do these things relate to each other?

Things that might not work as expected

DEPLOYING KUBERNETES CLUSTER ON AZURE

• [x] STEP 1: az login --output none might not actually log in if you don't have a subscription, even if you successfully go through the login process via de Browser (tested with Safari). No idea why. My workaround for this was doing the login in the CL with az login -u your_user_name and then writing your password.
• [x] STEP 5: This step seems to create two other different resource clusters that the one created in STEP 3. After following these two steps to the letter, I have in my Azure testhub, NetworkWatcherRG and MC_testhub_hubcluster_westeurope resource clusters.

TEARING DOWN YOUR BINDERHUB DEPLOYMENT

• [x] STEP 3: As there are more resource groups than expected, one of them, NetworkWatcherRG is not deleted in this step.

Errors/Typos

SETUP BINDERHUB

• [x] STEP 2: The commented line "s/<jupyter-ip>/${jupyter_ip}/" should go AFTER the config-template.yaml > config.yaml, otherwise the sed command hangs. In STEP 4, after setting the IP, that line, uncommented, has to be put back before the config-template line.

Who can help?

• @sgibson91

---

Updates

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing.

[sgibson91]

STEP 3. After following these two steps to the letter, I have in my Azure testhub, NetworkWatcherRG and MC_testhub_hubcluster_westeurope resource clusters.

Yeah, I don't know why that happens and neither does @trallard. @leestott any ideas why this happens? Most of the time they are empty resource groups, you can just delete them - either through the portal or with az group delete <group-name>.

[dalonsoa]

This is my MC_testhub_hubcluster_westeurope cluster. Certainly not empty. NetworkWatcherRG is indeed empty.

[sgibson91]

Oh yes, MC won't be empty, I don't know why it's created separately though. However, it will be deleted when you delete the resource group that contains the Kubernetes Service. NetworkWatcher can be safely deleted. Sometimes a group called DefaultResourceGroup_<location> is created too. It's quite annoying that these extra groups come out of nowhere.

[sgibson91]

Comments from Lee and Antony are that these resource groups are created with the idea that you will be extending your service in the future, which may be applicable in other Azure cases but not the BinderHub case. Antony will raise an enhancement request with the product team that these resources should be logically linked to the service that created them in such a way that they can be automatically deleted with the main resource group making tidying up after a service much easier.

[sgibson91]

I also want to say THANK YOU for going through this and having such amazing feedback, it's really helpful! ✨

[sgibson91]

• [ ] a high level description on what is to be done to have this up and running, i.e., the big picture of the following sections. This is not given even in the BinderHub Docs, except in one brief sentence. What's Kubernetes used for? Why is it needed? And Docker? And JupyterHub (this is the only obvious one)? How do these things relate to each other?

I'm going to link to these docs in PR #531

[sgibson91]

@all-contributors please add @dalonsoa for ideas, review

[allcontributors[bot]]

@sgibson91

I've put up a pull request to add @dalonsoa! :tada:

[sgibson91]

@all-contributors please add @dalonsoa for ideas, review

[allcontributors[bot]]

@sgibson91

I've put up a pull request to add @dalonsoa! :tada: