Building custom runtime images

Build custom runtime images to optimize the standard software configuration of a runtime for your application needs. For example, if you work in an air-gapped environment which forbids exposing any operations to the Internet, you might want to create your own, custom runtime image.

The standard runtime images that are available in Watson Studio contain pre-selected open-source libraries, as well as selected IBM libraries. You can build custom runtime images that are based on Jupyter notebooks images, JupyterLab images, and RStudio images.

You can also build:
  • Custom images based on SPSS Modeler runtime images, to install custom ODBC drivers.
  • Custom images for DataStage to perform root installations of third-party libraries.

To create a custom image, download the image of the runtime that you want to customize, build a new custom image by adding libraries to the image that you downloaded, register the new image, and finally update the environment template that you created in your project to use the new custom image.

Important considerations

If you use custom runtime images, you must consider the following aspects:
  • Custom runtime images for notebooks can't be built for Spark environments.
  • Custom runtime images can't be used in a deployment. You need to create a separate image for Watson Machine Learning.
  • It is your responsibility to ensure that all updates that are made to the available runtime images in Watson Studio, including all security updates, are also made to your custom images. Watch out for new fix packs or any related information. When new versions of IBM® Software Hub are released, we strongly encourage you to rebuild all of your custom images.
  • Custom images can only be used in the notebook editor, JupyterLab, and RStudio. You can't use custom images based on Watson Studio Jupyter runtimes in Watson Machine Learning or in Data Refinery.

Creating and registering a custom image

Important: You must carry out the following steps on all existing custom images each time you upgrade IBM Software Hub to rebase the image with the latest IBM Software Hub runtime image, which includes all of the latest fixes, including security fixes.
To create and register a custom image:
  1. Get the registry URL to use for Docker commands and in scripts. The Watson Studio runtime images are stored in a Docker image registry. In IBM Software Hub, you can only use an external registry outside of the IBM Software Hub OpenShift® cluster. To use that registry, you need the URL to the external registry that was used during the installation of IBM Software Hub. You use the same URL for all commands and in all scripts that you run.
  2. Downloading the configuration file for the runtime image that you want to customize. See Downloading the runtime definition.
  3. Downloading the image in the configuration. See Downloading the runtime image.
  4. Add customizations and build a new image. See Creating a custom image.
  5. Push the image to the container server. See Pushing the image to the registry.
  6. Change and upload the configuration file. See Uploading the custom configuration.
Note: If you created a custom image for JupyterLab, users will only be able to select the custom image in projects with Git integration. If you created a custom image for Jupyter notebooks, users can select it in all projects, with and without Git integration.