Updates 2019
Patch Note 2019-12-19
New features
Execution alerts
There's a new feature in town: execution alerts! Initially we'll be tracking input files' checksums: if an input file has changed since the last time you've used it as an input, the execution will have an alert associated with it.
You can view alerts in the Executions table view, and within each execution's detail view.
The project template flow got endowed with a bit of holiday UX magic.
The API now allows for creation of executions without an associated commit or step at all. The user interface changes for this are forthcoming. Stay tuned!
Bugfixes
On occasion, column specification data could be missing from the execution table view and cause an error. The error should be no more!
Scaling calls are done a little less aggressively, which should in turn make execution creation and some other things a little more responsive.
In the API, executions can now be ordered by their creation time.
Execution titles are now saved when focus moves away from the edit field, not only when hitting enter.
The pipeline graph view was taught to be less, shall we say, screwy, to allow for managing larger pipelines.
Patch Note 2019-12-11
New features
The profile and organization views were given a refresh:
The navigation menus are now on the left instead of up top, since we're packing so many features they simply couldn't fit!
There's a brand spanking new "latest executions" dashboard view for organizations to give you an overview of what's happening.
Bugfixes
The app now loads faster, thanks to lazy loading of certain components. Market research shows not each and every view actually needs charting and graphing, for instance!
Tasks should launch a lot faster due to optimizations made to environment scaling.
Some links between files in the Trace view were briefly missing. They've been found again.
Patch Note 2019-12-03
New features
A "Book Demo" button will now appear for new users! Let's talk!
You can now try out the Transformers project from our friends at Hugging Face with just one click on "Import Project" within Valohai. All the NLP goodness!
Bugfixes
Google Cloud Storage buckets with underscores wouldn't validate. Our bad! Now they will.
On occasion, the Trace view was attempting to link nodes to commits that hadn't been loaded yet, which caused terrible temporal discrepancies. We're back in a stable timeline now, though!
Very very very very very long messages in the messages overlay could make the close button unclickable. No more – we're splitting very very very very very long words these days. Can we also give huge props to our new dev Magda for shipping this fix on her second day on the job? Yes we can!
Patch Note 2019-11-27
New features
Team Access Grants were embettered:
They can now be created without assigned teams, in which case they only grant access to the organization.
You can add a description to them.
Organizations can now:
Forbid their members from creating personal projects.
Set a maximum lifetime for their members' API tokens.
Commit objects are now (optionally) shown in the trace view.
The project creation API endpoints now accept an
ownerparameter.The token creation API now allows setting an expiry time.
Bugfixes
External identity authentication errors (such as the user clicking Cancel) no longer result in an internal error.
Your workspace related settings, such as the columns you've selected for tables or tables, have always been saved client-side for your convenience. Now they're stored in an even more robust and efficient way!
If one tab in the Execution view fails, such as running out of storage space (see above), only the tab will error out, not everything.
S3 URLs with dots in bucket names are no longer mangled into a form that won't work.
The API is no longer accessible with HTTP basic authentication.
Token acquisition will no longer work for users with 2FA or external identities enabled.
Embedded images such as charts show up in notebook previews once more.
Other improvements
The Hard Stop status now has a proper color, icon and label.
Deployment detail views were gently de-uglified.
The projects dropdown menu is now scrollable within itself and won't expand into infinity and beyond.
Zeroes now actually show up in the fields in the organization environment management view.
Deleting running executions sends them a hard stop signal, canceling all uploads after the delete.
Patch Note 2019-11-13
New features
Organization administrators may now create and manage Team Access Grants. This feature allows users who are members of groups in external directory services to be automatically joined into Valohai organizations and teams. In this first version, the only supported identity provider is Azure AD. If or when you need help setting this up for your organization, our support is always available for you.
Speaking of which, you can now associate your Valohai account with an Azure AD identity, then use Azure AD to log in. (Note, however, that you can't log in using your username and password once you've associated your account with an Azure AD identity, and you probably don't need to do this unless instructed to do so by your organization administrator(s). But, you know, now you know the opportunity is there, and knowledge is power.) You can do this in the Settings > Authentication view.
Bugfixes
Extraneous Intercom popovers were re-banished, now with extra vigilance and a fresh citrus scent.
Patch Note 2019-11-11
New features
A bunch of small usability papercuts were fixed!
When choosing an input datum, the list is prepopulated with the latest data even if you don't search for anything.
Environments' slugs (short names) are now visible in the selection dropdown. You'll need them for the CLI or API.
When clicking the Fetch button while creating a deployment, the commit list is now automagically updated, as it is on other views.
Creating data stores was made a little more tolerant regarding the names of the stores.
The User menu on the top right loads asynchronously, making things a little snappier. Also, if you're an administrator of organizations, the organizations will also neatly show up in the menu now.
Bugfixes
Occasional gateway errors could occur when a request URL was especially complex (such as when viewing the metadata for a particularly many-executioned task). This should happen no more.
New CLI features
Hooray! Valohai-CLI 0.11 was released. Upgrade at your pleasure with pip install -U valohai-cli.
Before you do, though, please note that Python 2 is finally no longer supported by the CLI.
Bugfix: Set a hard limit for number of files to be packaged
Feature: Add
update-checkcommandFeature: Add ignore to get_files_for_package
Feature: Allow logging in using a pre-existing token
Feature: Python 2 is no longer supported
Refactor: Packaging improvements for API usage
UX: Embetter
vh exec run's user-friendlinessUX: Replace dashes with underscores when resolving commands
UX: show project owner if there are multiple owners in the returned data; sort projects by their display label
Patch Note 2019-10-29
New features
Executions can now be hard stopped; this will prevent them from uploading outputs, if they're still busy with that.
The obtrusive button to expand a metadata chart is no longer there – instead, simply double-click the chart to expand it.
You can now see banner messages from earlier page loads, so no more wondering what that fleeting little notification was.
New features (Jupyhai)
Pre-execution logs for packaging process and errors:
Ability to control execution contents by ignoring file/folder patterns.
The package contents is decoupled from notebook path. All files and folders are always included now.
The valohai/jupyhai Docker image (or any image based on it) can now be used for cloud execution, too.
Downloading execution logs is made asynchronous for faster fetching.
Bugfixes
Extraneous Intercom popovers were banished.
Some metadata values not supported in JSON are now simply stringified, so they, you know, work.
Stripe payments were made SCA compliant. Thanks, legislation!
Extra super hyper long status logs no longer bog everything down.
Multiple deployments per project should work more reliably.
Free licenses no longer show execution sorting buttons that would do nothing.
Random and logspace search can now be used with integer parameters.
The file limit for wildcard inputs was made more concrete; no more quiet truncation!
Help regarding pipelines was added to the freshly no-longer-beta pipelines feature.
Commits with empty or stepless configurations can now be fetched.
Pipeline deletion now works like execution deletion does.
Bugfixes (Jupyhai)
Browser session with different Valohai user than in Jupyhai no longer causes problems.
Patch Note 2019-10-03
New features
The execution logs can now show event times in your local time zone. No need to do UTC conversion in your head anymore!
Executions can now be copied into tasks.
The Trace view behaves better and also now has a Back button.
Tasks and pipelines can be deleted.
The table column selection dropdown gained a scrollbar – and a filter bar too!
Bugfixes
The Task view was told to be more careful about updating data. That is, it's now faster and uses less bandwidth.
Events can now be retrieved for executions in disabled environments too.
The tutorial behaves better these days.
Tasks now honor the project default environment setting.
Broken pipeline configurations no longer cause a full UI whiteout.
Patch Note 2019-09-03
It's been a while, but this update's a big 'un!
New features
Pipelines are now in open beta! See the docs here, kick the tires, and as always, if you need help, we're reachable over chat, email, snail mail, smoke signals, etc.! #putthisinyourpipeline
API call templates for execution, task and pipeline creation can now be viewed right in the creation views. #apidriven
In addition to the Jupyter notebook preview implemented last month, .txt, .md and .json files can now also be previewed right within the app. #xrayspecs
The heritage of executions and data can now be viewed in an all-new graph view. Look for Trace buttons! #directedacycliccrew
You've been able to chart metadata values over time for a while now – but now you can also compare parameter and (final) metadata values across a bunch of executions in a scatter chart. This is super duper useful to figure out #winning hyperparameters, for instance.
Bugfixes
Some overly religious iconography was toned down. Turns out "cross" can mean two things, who knew... #fontawesome
Free-tier users weren't able to view the API docs. Oops! #insertcoin
Clicking the revert buttons in certain views caused the page to scroll all the way up, which could be rather aggravating. That shall happen nevermore! #noscrollcrew
The tutorial was fixed to actually work where it should have – and you can now also quit the tutorial at any point if you're an expert. #imanexpert
Posting invalid JSON to the API will now let you know exactly what was the problem, not just an opaque "error 500". #parseparsebaby
Datum preview is now much more robust and doesn't require fiddling with CORS. #corsnomore
Metadata chart views were made faster, especially in the case of tons of executions to compare. #speedboost
Some overly snug popovers were given a bit of white-space padding. #airitout
Execution tables were slimmed out a bit, so you can see more data when you need to. #airitin
You can now debug erroneous HTTP responses (status >= 400) in the Deployment Tester. #oops
The metadata line chart legend works once more.
The task list API was made much faster. #speedboost (Hey, didn't I use that hashtag already?)
Patch Note 2019-08-05
New platform features
Jupyter .ipynb notebooks are now previewable within the datum browser, powered by a bunch of neat components written by the clever people at nteract.io.
Execution output checksums (MD5/SHA1/SHA256) are now stored if they are uploaded by the execution agent. They, too, are now available via the API.
Deployment endpoint logs are now viewable via the UI (and naturally the API too).
New CLI features
Rejoice! Valohai-CLI 0.10 was released. Upgrade at your pleasure with pip install -U valohai-cli
Feature: Add support for --parameter-file
Feature: Fall back to non-git packaging if git ls-files fails
Feature: Format human-readable tables better
Feature: Group parameter/input/regular options in exec run help output
Feature: Init: Mention Docker Hub in the Docker image choice phase
Feature: Make
--output-format=jsonmore robustFeature: Make it possible to not create or link a project during init
Feature: Output status messages to stderr
Bugfix: Make vh exec list show the newest executions, not the oldest ones
Bugfix: Read environment variable default values correctly from config
Bugfixes
The Commit Detail view looked a little wonky at times. It has been unwonked.
The Latest Metadata view now uses cumulative metadata as basis data. Previously, if you had over two thousand metadata events, only the last, well, two thousand were used to compute that latest metadata.
That Test button in the deployment version detail view now actually works again.
Patch Note 2019-07-18
New features
When searching for executions by tag, task tags are now taken into account.
Bugfixes
Execution/Task Creation: The environment selection box occasionally remained without selection, which was annoying.
Execution/Task Creation: When copying an execution or a task and changing the commit, ghostly input and execution values could remain in memory, making it impossible to actually create a new execution. A crack team of spectral extermination specialists were called upon, and the ghosts are no more.
Some icons that had gone missing are now back in action. Go icons, go!
The API (and consequently, the web app) was made faster all around, but especially so with large responses.
Patch Note 2019-07-08
New features
For private data stores, you can now see the store-specific URI (e.g.
s3://...) for a datum in the datum browser alongside the Valohai-specificdatum://URI.Running execution durations are now shown in the execution list.
Executor identities (i.e. the name of the machine running the execution) are now visible in the API and the execution detail view. This is meant for debugging private worker environments.
You can now use
{hernekeitto,teline}style alternation when using wildcards with custom data stores. That is,s3://foo/bar/*.{hdr,dat}will match all.hdrand.datfiles within that prefix.Our icon set was given a gentle refresh.
Bugfixes
Deployments will now be owned by (and thus manageable by) the project's owner, not the user creating them.
The Execution List API was made faster still, but at the (temporary) expense of not necessarily always showing all of the oldest metadata.
Patch Note 2019-06-28
Just a small bugfix release to make your Friday a little brighter.
Bugfixes
When charting multiple values, the metadata comparison view's click navigation now works correctly.
The tutorial no longer gets stuck with certain dropdowns.
Users limited to Azure instances no longer need to manually choose a data store.
Deployments with more than one enabled endpoint now work correctly after a brief regression.
Patch Note 2019-06-20
New features
Metadata comparison view: Because it's kinda convenient to actually see which of the executions is actually performing as well as it is, you can now click through to executions in the chart. The previous action, hide the series, is now available via alt-click.
Execution creation view: Did you know you can set a
descriptionfor steps in your Valohai.yaml file? Well, you can, and now we actually show it too! Useful for knowledge sharing in your teams.API: When creating an execution or a task via the API, we now derive all parameters from the step configuration.
Executions table now shows the task an execution belongs to, and you can click through to it. Very convenient!
Deployment: You can now see a list of enabled endpoints for an alias, with the appropriate aliased endpoint URLs.
When clicking through to an execution's commit, you can now get back to the same execution without having to reach for your browser's Back button.
The job executor now populates a new
/valohai/configfolder with information about the parameters, metadata and inputs for the execution in both YAML and JSON format. Full documentation for the formats and schemata of the files is forthcoming. Keep an eye on our docs! 👀The job executor now posts information about the files it downloads back to the application. This information is not yet visible, not even through the API, but it's one more step for total transparency and repeatability!
Bugfixes
UI: the project description is no longer shown in italic, because it's annoying to read long passages of italicized text.
UI: The
environmentpossibly preconfigured for a step is now honored in the execution view.UI: The execution table's paging is now reset when you change filtering options.
API: The execution list API was made a little faster. The bug, of course, was that it was slow.
API: When creating a task, the title you set is no longer propagated to the executions but stays where it's supposed to, in the task.
Data handling: The S3 integration was taught to not try and download folders as files, as that's a very silly thing to attempt.
Patch Note 2019-05-29
New features
The filters in the Execution logs view are now case-insensitive and support
|for "or".This means you can easily filter out, say, all
warning|errorlines.Execution output previewing was reinstated.
The API documentation is now much better and more accurate.
The Deployment detail view now hides disabled versions by default.
Bugfixes
The Deployment detail view now actually updates itself when versions and aliases are created or edited.
Repository ref names can now be arbitrarily long.
Patch Note 2019-05-22
Platform changes
New features
Support for enormous amounts of execution output files.
Previously the web application could become slow for your project if you produced thousands of outputs per execution.
The new approach we take to loading outputs in chunks makes it possible to manage virtually any number of output files.
Read-only and write-only data stores.
Previously Valohai stores required read and write permissions to your cloud provider storage.
Now you can define data stores as write-only or read-only e.g. to limit that some specific storage should't be uploaded to in any circumstances. Both store configurations still require the permission to list files to avoid overwrites.
A lot of usability improvements e.g. making Project delete and transfer buttons more distinct from each other.
Bugfixes
File browser layout won't break if the filename is of epic length.
Execution table filtering won't forget what step was specified if you reopen it.
You can now edit OpenStack Swift data store details without re-specifying Temp URL Key.
Patch Note 2019-04-30
Platform changes
New features
nvidia-docker 2 is now used as the runtime engine. This allows using images built on more recent CUDA setups, such as the official Tensorflow 1.13 images.
S3 inputs are much faster to resolve.
Enterprise users with custom environments can now set the grace period after which servers can be scaled down. It defaults to 15 minutes.
When available, the original creation and modification times of Datums are now acquired from workers.
When enough memory is available,
/tmpis now a tmpfs (RAM disk) on agent machines by default. You can explicitly enable or disable this per-execution by setting theVH_TMPFSenvironment variable to0or1.Carriage Return (
\r) characters are now better supported by the execution agent, so progress bars such as those emitted by the populartqdmmodule should work much better.Projects' queued/started execution counts are now shown in the dashboard.
Bugfixes
Docker image formats are now validated.
Multiple input defaults are now supported in the UI.
The job running agent won't attempt to download all inputs in parallel anymore.
Input files are cached for a longer time.
Jobs should finish faster, since less redundant information is saved.
The agent software will now consider 301 Redirects without a Location header erroneous. (This mainly concerns S3 URLs with an invalid addressing scheme.)
Valohai-CLI 0.9.0
A new version of the CLI tool was also released with a lot of new features and quality-of-life improvements.
New features
You can now use Valohai-CLI without a linked project aka. API driver mode.
See the documentation for this feature here.
A new
--syncflag was added to sync/download execution outputs as they come in.This is useful for TensorBoard support among other things.
You can now see the GPU available in an environment with
vh env --gpu.Ad-hoc commit management was improved.
Attempt to
git describewhen packaging ad-hoc commitsAdd validation of ad-hoc package and file sizes
Check whether we already know a particular adhoc commit to avoid reuploading it
Errors from the API are now formatted in a more human-readable way.
Python 2 support is being dropped due to its end-of-life approaching.
Bugfixes
Watch mode does not crash fatally when there are connection blips.
Looking up the newest commit now works properly.
Logging in asks for your password once only.
Patch Note 2019-04-16
Nothing very special this week – big things are in the pipeline though...
New features
The API now reports error codes in addition to user-readable errors. If you're using a custom integration, this may break your error-handling code. We apologize for any inconvenience!
You can now copy ad-hoc executions into new executions.
Bugfixes
Accidentally creating a duplicate execution or task is now harder.
Patch Note 2019-04-09
New features
Tutorial
There's a brand new tutorial for first-time users!
Commit view improvements
The commit information view, accessible via the Execution Detail view, now shows much more information than before.
Commit contents can now be downloaded (even for ad-hoc commits!). This can also be found in the commit information view.
Last but not least, the commit view now also has a link to the VCS provider's view for the same commit, if it is available. GitHub, GitLab and BitBucket are currently supported.
Commit API improvements
The commit API now allows posting a description with ad-hoc commits.
The commit API now allows querying commits by identifier.
Commits are now limited to 1000 MB (and a warning is shown if a commit is over 100 MB in size). You should not store large files in Git in the first place – use inputs instead!
Other niceness
Default environment variables specified in the YAML file are now respected by the Create Execution UI.
The Execution Creation API now honors the default environment type specified in the YAML file.
ED25519 SSH keys are now supported. Super secure, super elliptic!
The Create Execution / Create Task view got a gentle coat of our best UX polish. In addition, some T's were dotted and I's crossed, or the other way around, maybe.
The project dropdown menu now shows the organization name owning the project.
Numbers and booleans are now formatted much better in the execution and task list views.
Bugfixes
Numeric values (e.g. for metadata or parameters) are now finally sorted correctly in list views.
When you're a member of a team, the Create Project view no longer defaults to an arbitrary team.
The metadata chart's legend has been shoved below the chart itself, so comparing very many executions no more squashes the chart into an unreadable one-dimensional abomination.
Some SSH keys that previously mysteriously failed to work should now work better.
Patch Note 2019-03-21
New features
Private Docker images are now supported.
You can now set up authentication for accessing private Docker images from various registries.
Support currently exists for "traditional"
docker loginable registries. This includes e.g. Docker Hub, Gitlab, NVIDIA NGC.Support for Azure, AWS and Google registries is planned, so please contact us if you need this feature ;)
You can now compare the metadata of any number of arbitrary executions.
Simply select the executions in the list view and choose "Compare" in the toolbar.
Private cloud instances can now be directly administered.
If you are an enterprise user with a configured private EC2 cloud, you can now directly terminate Valohai-managed instances from within the application.
Bugfixes
S3 region setting now works correctly.
It didn't do so before in all cases.
The Execution view was calmed down a bit.
In some cases, the execution view could refresh data from the server a little too over-zealously, causing degraded performance. This has been fixed.
Very long datum names are now supported.
The internal limit for datum names is now four times as long (512 characters).
Patch Note 2019-03-07
New features
Tasks can now be deleted like executions can.
Executions can now be filtered based on the content of their notes.
Support was added for OpenStack v2 authentication and Swift setups without regions.
You can now set the region for custom S3 buckets.
Bugfixes
Projects' Default Environment setting is now honored when no environment is passed via the API.
Some UI glitches and ugliness was fixed, especially around the deployment feature.
Deleting projects now frees up their names for future reuse.
Valohai-CLI 0.8.0
In addition, there's a brand new version of the Valohai-CLI command line client.
Improvements and bugfixes since the last version (0.7.0, released in July) include:
Feature:
vh exec runallows--var/-v KEY=VALUE ...for environment variablesFeature:
vh exec runcan be run from non-git directories nowFeature: It's now possible to title executions using
--titleFeature: Linting has been improved
Feature: Multiple files per input are now supported
Feature: Stderr has been colored yellow instead of angry red
Bugfix: Ad-hoc packaging now happens only after parameters are validated, to save time
Bugfix: Files that don't exist (e.g. indexed in git but not on disk) aren't packaged
Bugfix: Input and parameter names with dots etc. now work
Bugfix: Watch does not crash if a single fetch temporarily fails
You can upgrade using pip install -U valohai-cli, though the instructions may vary depending on how you've installed the CLI in the first place.
Other changes
Network access is no longer available within executions for non-paid users, to cut down on abuse. You can still download and upload files using the inputs/outputs system, though!
Patch Note 2019-02-27
New features
Executions and tasks can now be re-titled in the list views.
Execution/task inputs can now be edited as text, making it easy to paste in many URLs.
You can now easily navigate to a project's repository's page on GitHub, GitLab or BitBucket.
Deployment traceability was improved.
Responses from models deployed with the Valohai deployment system will now contain an
x-vh-deployment-idHTTP header.A
valohai-metadata.jsonfile that contains as much of the "lineage" of the endpoint is now packaged into the deployed image. (It is up to the serving code to expose it or parts thereof, as it may contain potentially sensitive information.)
Bugfixes
Copying executions that had optional parameters now really works.
Minor graphical glitches were fixed.
Patch Note 2019-02-20
It's been a month since our last update! Time flies when you're busy building so many lovely things...
New features
Tasks can now be copied like executions can.
For tasks created before 2018-10, parameters are not fully copied though – sorry about that!
The execution table views gained new powers.
Executions can now be stopped and deleted en masse in the execution table views.
The execution environment is now an optionally visible column in the tables.
You can now filter executions by step name.
The metadata charts also got better!
You can now choose to use a logarithmic scale for Y axes.
Your chart settings are remembered (on your device) per-project.
You can now easily view the latest values for each metadata value in a single table.
Team member privileges within organizations were slightly overhauled.
Team members can now create new projects within the teams they're members of.
Team members can now configure the projects they're members of.
All organization members can now see projects which are not assigned to any team.
OpenSSH format keys are now supported for Git SSH authentication.
Until now, we only supported the old PEM format. OpenSSH 7.8, released in August 2018, defaults to the new OpenSSH format.
This support is powered by our open source openssh-key library.
You now get $10 worth of extra credit when adding a credit card to your personal account.
Bugfixes
Optional parameters now work correctly when copying executions.
Lapsed GitHub app authentications can now be reinstated.
Optional parameters being unset no longer cause a very large apparent number of executions for tasks.
Flag-type parameters work much better than before.
Patch Note 2019-01-21
New features
Organization invitations
The experience for adding new people to organizations was reworked. Instead of forcing people to join organizations, they must now accept an invitation sent to their email address.
Invitations can be sent to people who already have Valohai accounts, as well as to those who don't.
This also allows you to create invitations that add people to custom teams while they are being invited.
User experience improvements
Waiting for an execution to start and logs to appear is no longer as boring.
The UI is smarter about determining the step size for linear hyperparameter optimization sweeps.
The Revert button in the Create Execution/Task view was made a little subtler.
Some alerts are now much more visible.
Patch Note 2019-01-14
New features
Style refresh!
For the new year, we gave the look of the application a little refresh and polish.
Some views may look a little funky, since there're just so many features we may not have remembered to check all of them. If something's broken, please let us know! (For the webdev-minded among you, we upgraded from Bootstrap 3 to Bootstrap 4.)
Metadata chart improvements – Building on the new superpowered metadata chart from our last update...
You can hover over a dataset to highlight it in the chart.
You can again use a single shared Y axis for all series.
Private Cloud Dashboard
If you're one of the lucky organizations who use custom clouds with Valohai, you can now manage the scale factors via your Organization dashboard.
(If you'd like to run in a custom cloud, please contact our sales or support!)
Miscellaneous improvements
When looking at the details for an execution that uses uploaded data (
datum://URLs), we now fetch the details of that datum for you.You can now revert a single changed field within the Create Execution view, not only all of them at once.
We now prevent you from attempting to use an SSH private key with an HTTPS repository URL – that would never work anyway.
When editing custom data stores, you no longer have to re-enter all of the secret keys.
Bugfixes
Metadata chart bugfixes – all that [Chemical X][cx] added to the metadata chart caused a problem or two, which are now fixed:
New data no longer resets the chart's filtering.
The Execution metadata tab didn't always load correctly. Now it does.
Usage/Billing view
The Usage view now only counts finished executions.
The Billing view's USD bill estimate is no longer only zero.
Organization members can now see the usage information for projects they can access in their organization.
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