Impact of Modifying Instance Templates and Settings

Fleet Manager provides a single user interface for managing your Dataiku instances and modifying instance settings. While this allows for flexibility, the modifications you make can significantly impact your Dataiku users or even cause unwanted results.

In general, you can modify any instance setting that does not impact the operation of Dataiku. You can make modifications to your Dataiku instances by modifying the instance templates, virtual networks, or the instance settings themselves.

In this article, we’ll discuss the following and how each impacts or is impacted by modifications:

  • Data Disk

  • SaaS Model

  • Lifecycle

  • Monitoring Tools

  • Dataiku Releases and Security Patches

Data Disk

Dataiku instances are based on a data disk and an Operating System (OS) disk.

  • A provisioned instance of Dataiku on AWS is an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance provisioned from an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) template. Ths AMI is created and made available by Dataiku. A data disk is attached for storing Dataiku data.

  • A provisioned instance of Dataiku on Azure is an Azure Virtual Machine (VM) instance provisioned from an Azure image template. The image template is created by Dataiku and is made available through the Azure marketplace. A data disk is attached for storing Dataiku data.

The data disk contains everything relevant for Dataiku to run. You should avoid storing anything outside the data disk because when you upgrade or reprovision an instance, everything stored outside the data disk is lost.

The OS disk is where the OS and other binaries are installed. You can consider the OS as temporary because it is replaced every time you reprovision the instance.

Note

When an instance is reprovisioned, only the data disk is restored. The code environments and ML models need to be rebuilt, and the plugins need to be reinstalled.

SaaS Model

The deployment model offered by Fleet Manager is most similar to a SaaS model, where Dataiku is used as a service deployed by its management tool using settings and assets that have been configured earlier by Dataiku.

Dataiku Instance Lifecycle

A Dataiku instance is destroyed and reprovisioned many times during its lifecycle. Instances are temporary, and only the data disk is kept when reprovisioning or upgrading.

Monitoring Tools

Since Dataiku instances are temporary, it is a recommended best practice to minimize customizations or installation of monitoring tools. It is okay to install lightweight agents such as those that acknowledge the Dataiku instance in your organization’s network. You can do this by running ansible tasks in the Setup actions in your instance template.

Dataiku Releases and Security Patches

Fleet Manager follows the same release cycle as Dataiku DSS (Dataiku). The image template (such as the AMI or Azure image template) is updated at every Dataiku release. The image template is configured with the best settings for Dataiku and the latest security patches available at the time of creation.