What's new and changed in Watson Studio Runtimes

Watson Studio Runtimes updates can include new features and fixes. Releases are listed in reverse chronological order so that the latest release is at the beginning of the topic.

You can see a list of the new features for the platform and all of the services at What's new in IBM Software Hub.

IBM Cloud Pak for Data Version 5.1.2

A new version of Watson Studio Runtimes was released in March 2025.

This release includes the following changes:

New features
This release of Watson Studio Runtimes includes the following features:
Use Apache Spark 3.5 to run notebooks and scripts
You can now use environments that are based on Spark 3.5 to run your notebooks and scripts in Jupyter notebooks and JupyterLab. For more information, see Spark environments and JupyterLab environments.
Customer-reported issues fixed in this release
For a list of customer-reported issues that were fixed in this release, see the Fix List for IBM Cloud Pak® for Data on the IBM Support website.

IBM Cloud Pak for Data Version 5.1.1

A new version of Watson Studio Runtimes was released in February 2025.

This release includes the following changes:

Customer-reported issues fixed in this release
For a list of customer-reported issues that were fixed in this release, see the Fix List for IBM Cloud Pak for Data on the IBM Support website.

IBM Cloud Pak for Data Version 5.1.0

A new version of Watson Studio Runtimes was released in December 2024.

This release includes the following changes:

New features
This release of Watson Studio Runtimes includes the following features:
Use your IBM® watsonx.data™ Spark engine with Jupyter notebooks in Watson Studio

If you have IBM watsonx.data and Watson Studio provisioned, you can now create new Python environment templates that are based on the Spark engine that runs on your IBM watsonx.data instance. Then you can run your code in a Jupyter notebook directly from the Watson Studio user interface. For more information, see watsonx.data documentation.

Customer-reported issues fixed in this release
For a list of customer-reported issues that were fixed in this release, see the Fix List for IBM Cloud Pak for Data on the IBM Support website.
Deprecated features
The following features were deprecated in this release:
Environment templates for Spark based on Python 3.10 and R 4.2 are deprecated
The following environment templates for Spark that are based on Python 3.10 and R 4.2 are deprecated and will be removed in a future release:
  • Default Spark 3.4 and Python 3.10
  • Default Spark 3.4 & R 4.2
If you want to work with Spark, start using environment templates based on Python 3.11 and R 4.3.

For information on available environment templates, see Spark environments.

Removal of all environment templates based on Runtime 23.1
Environment templates based on Runtime 23.1 are not available anymore.
The USER_ACCESS_TOKEN environment variable is deprecated in Python runtimes

In Python runtimes, accessing your user token by using the USER_ACCESS_TOKEN environment variable is deprecated and will be removed in a future release.

For alternatives, see ibm-studio-lib for Python.