Web Applications Embedded in Cloudera Data Science Workbench

This topic describes how Cloudera Data Science Workbench allows you to embed web applications for frameworks such as Spark 2, TensorFlow, Shiny, and so on within sessions.

Many data science libraries and processing frameworks include user interfaces to help track progress of your jobs and break down workflows. These are instrumental in debugging and using the platforms themselves. For example, Spark provides a Spark Web UI to monitor running applications and TensorFlow visualizations can be run on TensorBoard. Other web application frameworks such as Shiny and Flask are popular ways for data scientists to display additional interactive analysis in the languages they already know.

Cloudera Data Science Workbench allows you to access these web UIs directly from sessions and jobs. This feature is particularly helpful when you want to monitor and track progress for batch jobs. Even though jobs don't give you access to the interactive workbench console, you can still track long running jobs through the UI. However, note that the UI is only active so long as the job/session is active. If your session times out after 60 minutes (default timeout value), so will the UI.

Cloudera Data Science Workbench exposes web applications for Spark and other machine learning frameworks as described here.