AI Notebooks - Utilisation de l’espace Workspace (EN)

Objective

This guide details how AI Notebooks workspaces work and the related best practices.

Instructions

What is a notebook's workspace?

AI Notebooks are managed Jupyter or Visual Studio Code notebooks, linked to compute resources (CPUs, GPUs) and storage.

This storage includes both the remote containers you have attached to your notebook, and your notebook's default storage.

Indeed, every notebook has by default an internal object storage volume attached, fully managed by OVHCloud, which is your workspace storage and is located at /workspace.

How do AI Notebooks' workspace work?

When your notebook is created, a /workspace directory is automatically created. It contains configuration information such as the Machine Learning framework you have chosen to launch your notebook (Miniconda, PyTorch, TensorFlow, ...), but also all your installed python libraries. This directory also allows you to store your data (datasets, codes, etc.).

When you stop your notebook, your workspace (/workspace) is automatically saved and pushed to your Object Storage. This means that all files contained in your /workspace directory will be saved for future use.

Therefore, the next time you restart your notebook, your workspace will be pulled directly from your Object Storage into /workspace. You will not need to reinstall your python libraries, re-import your data or anything else you put in the /workspace directory.

There is also a /data folder in which you can store your data. This solution is more efficient but ephemeral, meaning that it will not be persisted if you close your notebook or if it crashes. In other words, the data contained within this directory cannot be recovered if the notebook leaves the RUNNING state.

Here is a graph summarizing your notebook's workspace and ephemeral storage usage during its various states:

Deleting workspace files

If you run the ls -a command in your notebook's /workspace directory, you will see all the files and directories that your workspace contains, including hidden ones (whose names begin with a dot (.)).

Notebook deletion and workspace backup

When you delete a notebook, its workspace data stored in Object Storage is not automatically cleaned up. You can find and delete this data in the notebooks_workspace container of your Object Storage, under the notebook ID directory.

This means that even if a notebook is deleted, its state stored in Object Storage (including your notebook files) remains accessible.

Workspace billing

The first 10GB of the /workspace directory are free during 30 consecutive days. After this period, the price of OVHcloud Object Storage is applied for each GB. To learn how we bill AI Notebooks, refer to the Billing and lifecycle documentation.

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