15. Interactive services

Overview

Interactive services - a feature of the Cloud Pipeline that allows to set up an interactive application in a cloud infrastructure and access it via the web interface, leveraging cloud large instances.
This is useful when some analysis steps shall be performed in interactive mode. It can also be useful for navigating through the execution environment and for testing purposes.
Examples:

  • Debug scripts, that shall be used in batch jobs
  • Perform data post-processing using IDE
  • Install/Delete/Update software.

In the Cloud Pipeline, both Tools and Pipelines can be run as interactive services.

Supported services

Out of the box, Cloud Pipeline provides the following interactive services:

  • RStudio - IDE for R language that helps to make work with R a great deal more convenient. See example here.
    More details about RStudio you can find at https://www.rstudio.com/.
  • Jupiter Notebook - a web application that allows creating documents with code pieces, visualizations and narrative text inside.
    More details about Jupiter you can find at http://jupyter.org/.
  • Terminal - a window with a command line (shell). See example here.
    Note: Terminal access is available for all Tools and Pipelines.

List of services can be extended by users.

Additional interaction services that could be easily configured for Cloud Pipeline deployment:

  • Desktop services - some interactive services in tools do not have own Web GUI, but they can be launched from remote desktops, where launched tool instance acts as the remote server. Supported desktops:
  • VSCode extension - this option allows users getting access to the remote compute node's filesystem within IDE (VSCode/Cursor) and be able to execute code. Such functionality is useful for developing and testing computational jobs. See details here.
    More details about VSCode you can find at https://code.visualstudio.com/.