Cloud environment operations

Prior reading: Overview of Cloud Environments

Purpose: This document provides detailed instructions for performing operations on cloud environments through the Verily Workbench web UI.

Notes:

• These instructions all assume that you have already opened a workspace in the Workbench web UI and navigated to the Environments tab.
• This document does not cover doing work within a cloud environment, nor installing additional libraries/software.

List your cloud environments and check their status

Your environments are listed in the Environments tab of the workspace.

A badge in the top right corner of each environment’s card denotes its status, which can be one of the following:

• CREATING
• STOPPED
• STARTING
• RUNNING
• STOPPING

For more information about the operations you can perform on environments that are either STOPPED or RUNNING, see Operations on existing cloud environments. Environments that are in the process of STARTING or STOPPING cannot be operated on.

If you have an environment that seems stuck on either STARTING or STOPPING, please contact the support team for help.

Create a new cloud environment (JupyterLab Vertex AI Workbench instance)

In the Environments tab of your workspace:

1. Click “New cloud environment” to open the “Creating cloud environment” dialog.

   

2. Either select a cloud environment app from the list, or select the custom Compute Engine instance option. In the image below, the “JupyterLab Vertex AI Workbench” instance is selected. Click the “Next” button.

   

3. A default configuration will already be selected for you. Click the “Next” button.

   <img src="/images/cloud_envs/new_cloud_env_dialog2.png" alt=“Screenshot of Choose configuration dialog, the second step when creating a new cloud environment.“width=100%>

4. Select an environment image, or enter a custom container. In the image below, the “TensorFlow Enterprise” image is selected.

   You can also change the number of CPUs, which in turn changes the total memory available. If you selected a PyTorch or TensorFlow Enterprise image, you can also attach GPUs to the VM.

   <img src="/images/cloud_envs/new_cloud_env_dialog3.png” alt=“Screenshot of Customize dialog, the third step when creating a new cloud environment.“width=100%>

wb resource create gcp-notebook \
    --id <your-notebook-name> \
    --machine-type=<MACHINE_TYPE> \
    --location=us-central1-a \
    --vm-image-family=<IMAGE_FAMILY> \
    --vm-image-project=deeplearning-platform-release

You can also change the number of CPUs, which in turn changes the total memory available. If you selected a PyTorch or TensorFlow Enterprise image, you can also attach GPUs to the VM.

To learn more about configuring the compute profile of your environment, see Compute profile configuration options.

Once you’ve finished customizing configurations, click the “Next” button.

5. Enter an environment ID, name, and optional description. Click the “Create environment” button.

   

Other cloud environment app options

Cloud environments can be created with other apps besides JupyterLab Vertex AI Workbench:

• JupyterLab Spark cluster (Dataproc cluster)
• RStudio
• Visual Studio Code
• Custom

See Cloud environment app options for more details.

Operations on existing cloud environments

Edit environment ID and description

You can edit the ID and description of your cloud environment at any time. To do so, select ‘Edit’ in the action menu of the environment card. This will bring up the editing dialog. Edit the fields as needed, then click on the Update button to save your changes.

You cannot edit the name of your cloud environment.

Start cloud environment

To start a cloud environment that is currently stopped, click the ‘Start’ button. This will immediately send the instruction to start the environment; there is no confirmation step. However, there may be a lag of a few seconds before the status is updated in the graphical user interface.

Starting the environment should take less than a minute. During that time, you cannot stop the environment; you can only edit its name and description, duplicate it, or delete it.

Stop cloud environment

To stop a cloud environment that is currently running, click the ‘Stop’ button. This will immediately send the instruction to stop the environment; there is no confirmation step. However, there may be a lag of a few seconds before the status is updated in the graphical user interface.

Stopping the environment should take less than a minute. During that time, you cannot restart the environment; you can only edit its name and description, duplicate it, or delete it.

Duplicate cloud environment

You can duplicate a cloud environment by selecting ‘Duplicate’ in the action menu of the environment card.

This will bring up an environment creation dialog pre-populated will all required information. The pre-populated environment name and identifier (ID) will be based on the original values; you can change them during the creation step. You will still be able to modify the environment ID at a later date, but not the name.

To proceed with the creation of the duplicate environment, click the Create environment button.

You cannot modify the cloud compute profile of the new environment at creation time. However, you may do so afterward through the Google Cloud console as described in section Modify compute profile.

Delete cloud environment

You can delete a cloud environment by selecting ‘Delete’ in the action menu of the environment card.

This will bring up a deletion dialog that details what will be deleted and asks you to confirm the deletion request.

To proceed with deletion, check the box confirming your intent to delete the environment and its associated resources, then click the Delete environment button.

Modify compute profile

You cannot change the environment image and cloud compute profile of an existing cloud environment through the web UI. To generate a different configuration exclusively through the web UI, you must create a new cloud environment with the desired configuration. You can create as many cloud environments as you want within the same workspace.

However, it is possible to modify an existing environment’s compute profile through the Google Cloud console or via the Workbench CLI, using the wb resource update gcp-notebook command. To do this, the environment needs to be STOPPED first, as described in Stop cloud environment.

Note that you can stop and start your environments from the Google Cloud console UI itself.

To modify the compute profile of an existing cloud environment through the Google Cloud console:

1. From the right-hand panel of the workspace’s “Overview” panel, click on the link for your workspace’s associated Google Project. This will take you to the Google Cloud console with the correct project set.

2. From the menu in the upper left of the Console, navigate to the Vertex AI app page and click on Workbench in the left-hand menu (under NOTEBOOKS). If you have a hard time finding Vertex AI in the list of Google Cloud apps, you can use the search bar at the top of the console page to search for it.

   Your environments should be listed under the tab labeled USER-MANAGED NOTEBOOKS (not under INSTANCES).

3. Make sure that the environment you want to reconfigure is stopped before you try to modify it. Then click on the link for the environment to view its details, and click on the HARDWARE tab:

   

   
   

4. Then, update the machine type and (optionally) GPU configuration settings to the desired values and click “SUBMIT.” This screencast walks through the process:

To learn more about the available options, see Compute profile configuration options.

Get cost estimates for different environment VM configurations

As you can see in the screencast above, the cloud environment cost estimates change as you reconfigure the machine type and GPU settings. You can use this Cloud console view of your cloud environment to see an estimate of how much your environment would cost you if you left it RUNNING for a month.

Note that the estimated charges are specifically for a running cloud environment; if you stop a cloud environment, you are still charged for your cloud environment’s disk, but you are not incurring compute costs. As discussed above, it’s therefore recommended to stop your cloud environment when it’s not in use.

Note on button locations

On the Environments page, the buttons for operations that apply to existing environments are located in the additional actions menu, which is represented by a ’three-dot’ icon in the top right corner of each environments card.