Creating non-standard environment templates

Last updated: Nov 21, 2024

If none of the default environments provided by watsonx.ai Studio match your needs, you can create custom environment templates.

Required permissions: To create an environment template, you must have the Admin or Editor role within the project.

You can create environment templates for the following assets:

watsonx.ai Studio
- Notebooks in the Notebook editor
- Notebooks in RStudio
- Modeler flows in the SPSS Modeler
- Data Refinery flows
- Jobs that run operational assets, such as Data Refinery flows, or Notebooks in a project
DataStage
- DataStage Flows

Note:

If you want additional packages to be automatically installed in your environment template (software customization), you can configure this after the custom environment template is created. For details, refer to Adding customizations.

To create an environment template:

On the Manage tab of your project, select the Environments page and click New template under Templates.
Enter a name and a description.
Select one of the following engine types:
- Default: Select for Python, R, and RStudio runtimes for watsonx.ai Studio.
- Spark: Select for Spark with Python or R runtimes for watsonx.ai Studio.
- GPU: Select for more computing power to improve model training performance for watsonx.ai Studio.
- DataStage: Select for data integration with parallel engine runtime for DataStage.
Select the hardware configuration from the Hardware configuration drop-down menu.
Select the software version if you selected a runtime of "Default," "Spark," or "GPU."
If you selected "DataStage" for the runtime type, define the location:
- IBM if the runtime is on IBM Cloud.
- AWS for a remote runtime on AWS.

Where to find your custom environment template

Your new environment template is listed under Templates on the Environments page in the Manage tab of your project. From this page, you can:

Check which runtimes are active
Update custom environment templates
Track the number of capacity units per hour that your runtimes have consumed so far
Stop active runtimes.

Limitations

The default environments provided by watsonx.ai Studio cannot be edited or modified.

Notebook environments (Anaconda Python or R distributions):

You can't add a software customization to the default Python and R environment templates included in watsonx.ai Studio. You can only add a customization to an environment template that you create.

If you add a software customization using conda, your environment must have at least 2 GB RAM.

You can't customize an R environment for a notebook by installing R packages directly from CRAN or GitHub. You can check if the CRAN package you want is available only from conda channels and, if the package is available, add that package name in the customization list as r-<package-name>.

After you have started a notebook in an watsonx.ai Studio environment, you can't create another conda environment from inside that notebook and use it. watsonx.ai Studio environments do not behave like a Conda environment manager.

Spark environments:

You can't customize the software configuration of a Spark environment template.

Next steps

Customize environment templates for Python or R

Learn more

Parent topic: Managing compute resources