Singularity Hub Announcement
announce July 16, 2019I’m happy to announce that we will cautiously be opening up Singularity Hub after quite an eventful July. This version of Singularity Hub follows a malicious use of our API that indeed did put the future of the service at risk. I say cautiously because we have disabled building for all except for a group of testing users, and will plan on re-enabling building for everyone later this week, or sometime next week. If you are interested in being a testing user, please let me know. Through the end of this week I’m going to be monitoring the service like a hawk, and all users should expect intermittent restarts if necessary.
Quick Links
For quick links, see the new limits and release notes.
Your Expectations
I want to remind everyone that this is a build service primarily for academics and small groups to create and then use their containers. It is developed at Stanford University and not an enterprise service. With this in mind, I appreciate everyone’s patience as I’ve been doing this work. It really has been a night and day sort of deal, and I’ve been doing absolutely everything in my power to move forward from the event. There have been quite a lot of changes to the server, so if you run into an issue please let me know so I can address it promptly.
Changes
Moving forward we have to ensure the longevity of the resource. Thus I have implemented limits and quotas with respect to usage of the server, and it’s essential that you read about these in our new limits page on the documentation site. Briefly, there are no longer public containers in storage, and access is controlled via the main server. Most views require a login, and are rate limited. Extraneous tools, views, and functionality has been removed. Before you interact with an shub unique resource identifier, you need to think. Any given container has a weekly allowance of 100 GET requests, and that’s it. This means that instead of issuing an exec or a run to a shub unique resource identifier, you need to pull it first, and then interact with the container binary. Moving forward it’s essential that you understand these limits, and follow best practices for requesting to use containers so you essentially don’t use up any quota.
You’ll also notice this beautiful, new documentation site! In response to user feedback, I’ve created these better organized and searchable documentation pages.
I’m hopeful moving forward that users will interact with our service and APIs responsibly. I gave out a survey for feedback at the end of June, and although the timing is ironic, that is in fact a different thing. In the next few weeks, months, as we figure out updates for Singularity Hub in response to this feedback, I will keep everyone informed! In the meantime, if you have a question, or would like to be added as a tester, or just want to say hello, please don’t hesitate to reach out.