The release of IBM Spectrum Conductor 2.5.0 includes many enhancements to Anaconda management, including both usability improvements and new features that are designed to improve your experience with Anaconda management in IBM Spectrum Conductor.
A smaller Miniconda distribution is packaged and available in IBM Spectrum Conductor 2.5.0 that you can use instead of the larger Anaconda distribution. The Miniconda distribution size is around 40 packages, which means that deployment and base clone operations are much quicker than when the full Anaconda is used.
Speaking of cloning, you can now clone any existing environment from the GUI instead of being able to clone only the base environment.
You might notice from the previous screen capture the options to run conda operations offline or on a single host are available. Forcing operations to run on single hosts is useful in the case that you install IBM Spectrum Conductor in the local file system on your hosts, but your Anaconda environment is in a shared directory. The selected options are saved for future subsequent Anaconda operations, saving you time from reselecting the same options every time you want to run the operation again.
You can create an Anaconda environment based on sample environment YAML files that are included in IBM Spectrum Conductor 2.5.0.
As an enhancement to package installation, you can now specify multiple channels from which to download those packages.
New operations are available that you can use to your advantage when you are managing conda environments:
Update
Specify an environment YAML file with which to update an existing environment with the packages included in the environment YAML file.
Sync
Create the existing conda environment on hosts in the Anaconda instance resource group that do not yet have the conda environment, or update the hosts that do have the environment but not necessarily at the correct level.
Export
Export the environment YAML file for the current environment and download it through the web browser.
To manage your environments, you can resolve failed operations more seamlessly with the following two new options:
Clear Error
If you decide that you no longer want to attempt the operation, you can clear the error from the GUI.
Retry
If you want to try the same operation again, such as after you made an operating system (OS) adjustment on the host.
Other enhancements include more detailed logging to easily identify logs for individual operations. In addition, you can now run a repository creation script offline to generate local file repositories for conda packages in environments that are not connected to the internet.
Give it a try and tell us what you think by downloading IBM Spectrum Conductor 2.5.0 on Passport Advantage or the evaluation version! We hope you are as excited as we are about this new release!
Log in to this community page to comment on this blog post. We look forward to hearing from you on the new features, and what you would like to see in future releases.
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