New Features and Changes in Cloudera Data Science Workbench 1.8.0

Major features and updates for Cloudera Data Science Workbench.

Production Machine Learning
Machine Learning (ML) lifecycle focused functionality enabling ML Engineers and Data Scientists to cut time to production for ML models from weeks to minutes and scale ML use cases without compromising enterprise security, maintainability, and governance standards.
Ability to monitor model metrics
CDSW allows you to track individual model predictions and analyze the metrics using custom code. Monitoring models’ functional and business performance requires specialized tooling and CDSW now includes native functionality to enable the storage and access of custom and arbitrary model metrics. Included as well is the ability to track individual predictions to ground truth ensuring models are performing optimally and compliantly.
Improved model security
Model REST endpoints now have additional security features that allow user-level access control to prevent unauthorized users from accessing the endpoints. This enables models to be served in a production ML environment without compromising security.
Quota management is generally available
Resource quotas provide constraints that limit the aggregate CPU, memory, and GPU resource consumption per user. Default quotas can be configured for a Workspace, which can be overridden on a per-user basis with Custom quotas. Quota management is now generally available.
New Web Browser Timeout Settings for Admin and User
The default Admin user timeout is one hour, regardless of activity. For users, the default timeout is 24 hours. Five minutes before the timeout is reached, a message displays, asking if the user wants to remain logged in. If the user clicks Dismiss or does not see the reminder, they have to log back in when their session expires. The timeout settings can be changed in Admin > Security.
Updated Session Start view
The user experience around starting a new CDSW session has been enhanced.
Ability to add CDSW session metadata information
Administrators can make it mandatory for the users to enter additional metadata before starting a CDSW session. Administrators can configure up to three fields to collect such additional metadata information for compliance purposes and can make these mandatory to be filled in. This metadata is captured and stored in the user_events database table and in the audit log as key-value pairs.
Base Engine 13 support
CDSW supports and deploys Base engine 13 that ships with both Python versions 2.7.18 and 3.6.10, and R version 3.6.3.
Ability to use custom command-line arguments for sessions and jobs
CDSW jobs run scripts, and the scripts need you to pass arguments while they are being executed. You can set these command-line arguments in the Engine’s Command Line Arguments field when you create a job. These command-line arguments are shared by CDSW sessions, jobs, and experiments in a project. The arguments can be accessed inside your scripts the same way CLI arguments are normally used.
CDSW displays engine total resource consumption
The Engine Profile now reflects the total resource consumption required to run engines. This means that apart from the “effective” resources used for computation, the additionally required “sidecar” resources are also counted, and enforced when using quotas.
Syntax highlighting support for additional programming languages
CDSW now supports syntax highlighting for the following languages when you are previewing a file: XML, CSS, JS, HTML, CoffeeScript, SQL, and CSV.
Ability to configure Windows line endings for Git integration
Previously, when CDSW Brackets editor interacted with files having Windows line endings, the Brackets editor converted all the Windows line endings to Linux line endings distorting the git log. The behavior to use Windows line endings is now configurable by the Administrator on a site level.
Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is disabled by default
CORS is now disabled by default. You can enable CORS if you have web applications on different domains that need cross-domain communication with the CDSW API.
OS support changes
CentOS 7.2 is no longer supported.