Engine Upgrade 1.6.0

Cloudera Data Science Workbench 1.6.0 (and later) ships version 8 of the base engine image.

Cloudera Data Science Workbench 1.6.0 (and later) ships version 8 of the base engine image which includes the following versions of R and Python:

R - 3.5.1
Python - 2.7.11, 3.6.8

Pre-installed Packages in Engine 8

For details about the packages included in the base engine, see Cloudera Data Science Workbench Engine Versions and Packaging.

(For Upgrades Only) Move Existing Projects to the Latest Base Engine Images

Make sure you test and upgrade existing projects to Base Image v8 (Project Settings > Engine) to take advantage of the latest fixes. There are two reasons to do this:

Container Security
Security best practices dictate that engine containers should not run as the root user. Engines (v7 and lower) briefly initialize as the root user and then run as the cdsw user. Engines v8 (and higher) now follow the best practice and run only as the cdsw user. For more details, see Restricting User-Created Pods.
CDH 6 Compatibility
The base engine image you use must be compatible with the version of CDH you are running. This is especially important if you are running workloads on Spark. Older base engines (v6 and lower) cannot support the latest versions of CDH 6. If you want to run Spark workloads on CDH 6, you must upgrade your projects to base engine 7 (or higher).