Using cloud environments for analysis

Introduction

A cloud environment is a configurable pool of cloud computing resources. Cloud environments consist of a virtual machine and a persistent disk, with some useful libraries and tools preinstalled. They’re ideal for interactive analysis and data visualization, and can be finely tuned to suit analysis needs.

Cost is incurred while the cloud environment is running, based on your configuration. You can pause the environment when it’s not in use, but there’s still a charge for maintaining your disk.

You can create and manage multiple cloud environments per workspace. The environments can have different base images (e.g., one for TensorFlow experiments, another for working with R), and can differ in the machine configuration and number of attached GPUs. You might set up a many-core VM for prototyping on-node ML training or doing a complex analysis, and a cheaper lightweight environment for setting up Dataproc clusters, where the heavy lifting is done on the Dataproc cluster, and the notebook that launches the cluster doesn’t need to do a lot of computation.

Cloud environment app options

When creating a new cloud environment in a Workbench workspace, you have a few application options to choose from:

• JupyterLab (Vertex AI Workbench instance)
• JupyterLab Spark cluster (Dataproc cluster)
• RStudio (Compute Engine instance)
• Visual Studio Code (Compute Engine instance)
• Custom (Compute Engine instance)

JupyterLab Vertex AI Workbench

To create a new cloud environment with JupyterLab Vertex AI Workbench, see Create a new cloud environment (JupyterLab Vertex AI Workbench instance).

JupyterLab via Dataproc (managed Spark) cluster

If you select “Spark cluster via Dataproc”, see Using Dataproc and Hail

RStudio and Visual Studio Code

If you select either RStudio or Visual Studio Code, you can modify the CPUs of the host VM.

Custom

You can create a custom app and share it with other users in the same workspace. First, select “Custom.”

Then provide your public Git repository URL and the folder to your devcontainer.json definition if it’s not in the root folder. It should look like this:

Then proceed to create your app. The app definition will be available for everyone in the workspace and will show up in the app dropdown next time you create a new cloud environment.

Configuring and using a cloud environment

After a cloud environment reaches the RUNNING state, click on the environment’s name to bring up a JupyterLab Notebook server in a new window. From this UI, you can create and run Jupyter notebooks, and use the terminal to work from the command line.

Setting up cloud environment defaults

You will probably want to configure your cloud environment to tailor them to your particular analysis tasks. This notebook sets up some reasonable defaults for your workspace environment, and this one creates some resources expected to exist for many Workbench tutorials. These notebooks perform some common and useful workspace setup tasks, including:

• Configuring the user name and email address to use for your Git commits.
• Creating Cloud Storage bucket resources used in Workbench tutorials.
• Creating a BigQuery dataset resource used in Workbench tutorials.
• Creating a directory on this machine for Python virtual environments used in Workbench tutorials.

(If you take a closer look, you’ll notice that some of the resources set up by this notebook are configured to autodelete older content after a period of time. This alleviates the need for you to remember to delete example and temporary data).

You may want to modify this notebook further for your own purposes.

Accessing the wb command-line tool from your cloud environment

The wb command-line utility is automatically installed and configured in your cloud environments. From the terminal window, or from a notebook cell, you can use this utility to get information about your account, workspaces, and workspace resources. Below are a few examples.

$ wb auth status
User email: xxxx@google.com
Proxy group email: PROXY_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@verily-bvdp.com
Service account email for current workspace: pet-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@terra-vpp-quick-rhubarb-111.iam.gserviceaccount.com
LOGGED IN

wb resource list lists all the resources defined for the current workspace:

$ wb resource list
NAME                            RESOURCE TYPE         STEWARDSHIP TYPE      DESCRIPTION
nb-repo                         GIT_REPO              REFERENCED            (unset)
nextflow_tests                  AI_NOTEBOOK           CONTROLLED            (unset)
nf-core-sample-data-repo        GIT_REPO              REFERENCED            (unset)
rnaseq-nf-repo                  GIT_REPO              REFERENCED            Respository containing a Nextflow RNA...
tabular_data_autodelete_aft...  BQ_DATASET            CONTROLLED            BigQuery dataset for temporary storag...
terra-axon-examples             GIT_REPO              REFERENCED            (unset)
ws_files                        GCS_BUCKET            CONTROLLED            Bucket for reports and provenance rec...
ws_files_autodelete_after_t...  GCS_BUCKET            CONTROLLED            Bucket for temporary storage of file ...

You can see details of a resource given its name:

$ wb resource describe --id ws_files
Name:         ws_files
Description:  Bucket for reports and provenance records.
Type:         GCS_BUCKET
Stewardship:  CONTROLLED
Cloning:      COPY_NOTHING
Access scope: SHARED_ACCESS
Managed by:   USER
Properties:   class Properties {
    []
}
GCS bucket name: terra-vpp-quick-rhubarb-111-ws-files
Location: US-CENTRAL1
# Objects: 0

You can use the wb resource resolve command to find the underlying resource that a name points to. You will often see this command used in example notebooks. This makes it straightforward to work with easily-remembered resource names and to access the underlying URI when needed.

$ wb resource resolve --id ws_files
gs://terra-vpp-quick-rhubarb-111-ws-files

Viewing and managing your cloud environments via the Cloud console

In addition to viewing the status of your cloud environments in the Workbench web UI, you can also view them in the Google Cloud console. This provides another interface for launching JupyterLab for a notebook environment, stopping/starting your environments, and making some configuration changes. (However, you must create and delete your environments via Workbench.)

You can follow the project link in a workspace description page to visit the Cloud console for the workspace project, then visit https://console.cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/workbench/user-managed to see your cloud environments. You can also navigate to Vertex AI » Workbench in the Cloud console.

Specifying a container image as the basis for a notebook environment

The Workbench web UI also allows you to specify a container image as the basis for a cloud environment.

A number of prebuilt containers are listed here. If you wish to create a custom container, you should use one of these containers as your base image, as they include the necessary config for successfully launching a cloud environment.

The container images you build must be Docker container images. Private images may only come from the Google Cloud Artifact Registry. See this page for more details on setting up an Artifact Registry and using Cloud Build to build and push your custom image to the registry.