Limitations for Analytical Applications

This topic lists all the limitations associated with the Analytical Applications feature.

  • Securing project resources

    Cloudera Data Science Workbench (CDSW) applications are accessible by any user with read-only (or higher) access to the project. However, CDSW does not actively prevent you from running an application that allows a read-only user (for example, Viewers) to modify files belonging to the project. We recommend to make the application truly read-only in terms of files, models, and other resources belonging to the project.

  • Public Applications

    By default, authentication for applications is enforced on all ports and users cannot create public applications. If desired, the Administrator user can allow users to create public applications that can be accessed by unauthenticated users.

    To allow users to create public applications on an ML workspace:
    1. As an Administrator user, turn on the feature flag in Admin > Security by selecting Allow applications to be configured with unauthenticated access.
    2. When creating a new application, select Enable Unauthenticated Access.
    3. For an existing application, in Settings select Enable Unauthenticated Access.

    To prevent all users from creating public applications, go to Admin > Security and deselect Allow applications to be configured with unauthenticated access. After one minute, all existing public applications stop being publicly accessible.

  • Port availability
    CDSW exposes only 3 ports per running session. This means you can run a maximum of 3 web applications simultaneously in a session:
    • one on CDSW_APP_PORT
    • one on CDSW_READONLY_PORT
    • and, one on the now-deprecated CDSW_PUBLIC_PORT

    However, by default the editors feature runs third-party browser-based editors on CDSW_APP_PORT. Therefore, for projects that are already using browser-based third-party editors, you are left with only 2 other ports to run applications on: CDSW_READONLY_PORT and CDSW_PUBLIC_PORT.

  • Transparent Authentication

    CDSW can pass user authentication to an Application, if the Application expects an authorized request. CDSW uses the REMOTE-USER field for this task.