The following release notes correspond to the date of September 17, 2020, and describe changes to the Terra UI and Notebooks with the introduction of our new detachable persistent disk feature.
Renaming “Notebook runtime” to “Cloud environment”
You’ll notice the name change with today’s release. We’re making this change for two reasons:
- In the future, Terra will expand to support launching additional interactive applications on cloud computing resources outside of Jupyter notebooks, so the name ‘notebook runtime’ is not widely applicable.
- We’ve now added support for detachable persistent disks to the VMs underlying the cloud environment, and we wanted to use this opportunity to more clearly define the components that you’ll need to manage the cost and lifecycle for when you create a cloud environment.
As noted in the UI, a cloud environment consists of the application configuration (previously named ‘environment’), cloud compute (a VM) and your persistent disk.
Support for persistent disks
Cloud environments for Jupyter notebooks that are created using the ‘standard VM' option now support detachable persistent disks. You can now keep your disk and save it for later whenever you decide to delete your cloud environment. We’ll reattach the disk the next time you create a new cloud environment.
You're advised to save your data in the directory where your disk is mounted, which is ‘/home/jupyter-user/notebooks’. Anything saved outside of this directory is not saved to the persistent disk, and will still be lost on deletion. We plan to change the name of this directory to ‘user disk’ in the near future to make this clearer.
Note that cloud environments using Hail and Spark do not support the persistent disk feature. Learn more about persistent disks in our documentation.