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

In the Environments tab of your workspace:

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

   

2. Enter a name and optional description and click the “Next” button.

   

3. Either select an image from the list, or enter a custom container. In the image below, the “TensorFlow Enterprise” image is selected.

   

4. Select the number of CPU cores you want, which in turn determines the memory available. Optionally, you can also configure your environment to attach GPUs to the VM.

   

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

Operations on existing cloud environments

Edit environment name and description

You can edit the name 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 identifier (ID) of your cloud environment.

Start cloud environment

To start a cloud environment that is currently stopped, select ‘Start’ in the action menu of the environment card. 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, select ‘Stop’ in the action menu of the environment card. 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 name at a later date, but not the ID.

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

You cannot modify the cloud compute profile of the new environment at creation time. However, you 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 press 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 terra 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.

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.