The (too?) short answer is: the process is still very informal. A good first step is opening an issue on https://github.com/jupyterhub/team-compass this will get more of the team involved, most discussions about current federation members happened in issues there so it is easier to link to them and a lot of this is based on trust between all the involved people. There is a monthly team meeting open to everyone (it would be a good place to talk about this https://github.com/jupyterhub/team-compass/issues/297 unfortunately the June meeting is Asia timezone friendly/early Europe time which might make it hard to attend from a Americas timezone)
There are currently four members of the federation. For each it was different/personal how we ended up having them join the federation. Every time we do this we try and get a bit more formal and repeatable about it.
Most members of the federation (GKE, OVH, Turing) provide us with a bare kubernetes cluster on which we deploy a BinderHub from https://github.com/jupyterhub/mybinder.org-deploy/ (via travis). This helps keep the clusters in sync, shared config, etc. We can kubectl ... on all these clusters to take care of admin things. On GKE and Turing we have full control, for OVH the OVH team takes care of provisioning nodes and such.
The Gesis cluster is managed independently via https://github.com/gesiscss/orc. @arnim and @bitnik work for the Gesis institute which sponsors this bare-metal cluster. They take care of everything, including keeping configs and versions in sync (lots of it automated), running the hardware, network, etc.
Either approach works for us, they each have pros and cons.
Some related links:
- https://jupyterhub-team-compass.readthedocs.io/en/latest/binder/subdomains.html we did write down something around assigning sub-domains of mybinder.org. Most of these expectations hold true for joining the federation, not only because we assign a sub-domain in the process
- https://github.com/jupyterhub/mybinder.org-deploy/issues/1124 @sgibson91 wrote a short application to get credits from Azure via the Alan Turing institute which corresponds to turing.mybinder.org
- https://github.com/jupyterhub/team-compass/issues/217 a start on “a technical checklist for joining the federation”
-
https://github.com/jupyterhub/team-compass/issues/204 some of the in writing discussion of gesis.mybinder.org joining the federation and assigning the sub-domain. They are now the second largest cluster by traffic, 10% was a low ball starting point
