Notebook environments for Satellite locations

By selecting an environment that runs in a Satellite location, you can run notebooks and notebook jobs directly at the cloud providers outside the IBM Cloud.

Environments for Satellite locations are available to users of paid Watson Studio Cloud plans in the Dallas region. Currently, you can only create Python and R environments. Spark and GPU environments for Satellite locations are not supported.

Access Satellite locations from notebooks

Watson Studio does not offer default Satellite environments. To run a notebook or a notebook job in a Satellite location, you need to create an environment definition, specify the hardware and software configuration of the runtime and the Satellite location. Currently, you can only create environment definitions for the prebuilt Satellite location in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center in Cloud Pak for Data as a Service instances running in Dallas.

You must have the Admin or Editor role within the project to create an environment definition.

To create an environment definition for the prebuilt Satellite location:

1. From the Environments tab in your project, click New environment definition.
2. Enter a name and a description.
3. Select the environment type Default.
4. Choose the hardware configuration sizes for vCPU and RAM and the software version. The supported software versions are Python 3.7 and R 3.6.
5. Select the AWS (via Satellite) location.

6. Select the region aws-useast1-nvirginia (aws-useast1-nvirginia-r01).

   Note that the display name was changed from aws-useast1-nvirginia (wdc) to aws-useast1-nvirginia (aws-useast1-nvirginia-r01). Existing environment definitions that use the old display name can still be used.

7. Create the environment definition.

   The new environment definition for the Satellite location is listed under Environment definitions on the Environments page of your project. You can customize the software configuration of the environment definition you created for the Satellite location. See Customizing environment definitions.

After you have created the environment definition, you can select it when you create or open a notebook in the notebook editor or create a notebook job. Note that the notebook or job files and all metadata remain at the Cloud Pak for Data as a Service site. Only the execution of the notebook or job is done at the Satellite location.

Next steps

• Create a notebook and open it in the Satellite environment that you created. See Create a notebook.
• Learn how to connect to AWS and access data from your notebook. See Access data in an AWS S3 bucket.
• Create a notebook job and run the job in the Satellite environment that you created. See Create a notebook job.

Learn more

• Change the environment of an existing notebook to use a Satellite environment. See Change environment.
• Edit an existing notebook job to run in a Satellite environment:
  • From within the notebook editor. See Editing notebook job settings.
  • From the project’s Jobs tab. See Viewing job details to edit settings.
• Stop active notebook runtimes
• Track the capacity unit consumption of runtimes