Tiny JupyterHub spawning on EKS?

JupyterHub
1

Hello,
I am very new to JupyterHub. Please forgive me, if my questions are stupid. I have successfully started “The littlest JupyterHub”, and I am still struggling with the “JuypterHub on Kubernetes” docs. My goal is something in between:

I want to run JupyterHub on some tiny host (a small vserver, or a micro EC2 instance), because it is typically accessed only once per week, and I want to avoid costs. This tiny JupyterHub should spawn notebook servers using AWS Kubernetes (EKS), because every now and then I need hundreds of notebooks.

Is such a setup possible? Can I find a description somewhere, how to do the setup?

Heinrich

2

It’s possible- you can install JupyterHub on a VM and use KubeSpawner to spin up singleuser servers on Kubernetes.

It’s not clear to me why you’d want to though. Are you planning to delete and recreate your Kubernetes cluster everytime?

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Thanks for asking. I was not aware of the costs of an EKS cluster without worker nodes. I thought I’d only pay for the worker nodes.
Yes, after finding that an unused cluster costs 73$ per month, I’ll probably try to spin up a cluster on the first request and delete it when it is idle for a few hours. I’ll try to find out what I have to change in JupyterHub to make this happen.
Or maybe you have a better suggestion?

Heinrich

4

A similar thread came up a while ago:

I’ve never used GitHub - uktrade/fargatespawner: Spawns JupyterHub single user servers in Docker containers running in AWS Fargate but it might work for you- it’s using ECS instead of EKS. The idea behind fargate is that you only pay for the computing resources used and not for the overhead of running the ECS cluster so it could work out cheaper.

EKS can also run with Fargate nodes, this might allow you to use Z2JH without paying for a full EKS cluster- since the JupyterHub hub and proxy pods don’t need much resources you can leave them running on EKS Fargate. This isn’t something I’ve looked into though so I might be wrong, but if Z2JH works with EKS Fargate that’s a very nice option for running a scalable cluster using the standard Helm chart.

If you research this please report back, it’d be very useful for others!

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Unfortunately you still get charged the fixed cost of $73/month for an EKS cluster on Fargate :cry:

If you have any success with the FargateSpawner let us know!