watsonx.data subscription plans

IBM® watsonx.data is offered on IBM Cloud under two pricing plans: Lite plan and Essential plan.

Each region has a finite number of watsonx.data instances that are provisioned based on the current compute capacity. Regions might reach their capacity limits temporarily. If the resource capacity is exceeded, you get the following message:

The new instance cannot be created because of resource capacity restrictions.
Please use another region, or retry later when additional capacity may be available in the current region.

Lite plan

The Lite plan is provided for you to try the basic features of watsonx.data and is available to all IBM Cloud account types like trial, pay-as-you-go, and subscription. It supports the basic features only. It is not available on AWS and is limited to one watsonx.data instance per IBM Cloud account (cross-regional).

To provision a Lite plan instance, see watsonx.data Lite plan.

Key supported features

  • Ability to monitor Resource Unit usage across Lite plan instances per an account and provision a new Lite plan instance based on the Resource Unit availability.
  • Ability to pause and resume Presto engine.
  • Ability to provision, unprovision, pause and resume Spark engine.
  • Ability to connect to an IBM Cloud-provided Cloud Object Storage (COS) bucket and provide credentials to your own COS or S3 bucket.
  • Ability to delete Presto, Spark, Milvus, and connect to your own bucket.

Limitations

  • The Lite plan is limited to 500 resource units (RUs) before the instance is suspended. Your plan expires on reaching either the limit of 500 RUs or exceeding the trial period of 30 days.
  • The Lite plan is limited to a maximum of one Presto engine, one Spark engine (small size, single node) or Milvus service with starter size (1.25 RUs per hour) or all three.
  • The Lite plan is limited to the smallest node sizes and profiles for each engine and service. You cannot increase the node size.
  • The Lite plan instances cannot be used for production purposes.
  • The Lite plan might be removed anytime.
  • The Lite instances are unrecoverable (no BCDR).
  • Engine scaling functionality is not available in the Lite plan.
  • Milvus backup is not available with the Lite plan.
  • In Lite plan instances, users can view Milvus services but are restricted from performing any write operations or administrative tasks.
Important: You must be connected to your own bucket to save and backup any data that is external to the Lite instance before full consumption of the Lite plan resource units.
Note: To upgrade to another plan, you must have a pay-as-you-go or subscription IBM Cloud account and provision a distinct Essential instance of watsonx.data.

Essential plan

You must have a pay-as-you-go or subscription IBM Cloud account to avail the Essential plan. It is available on IBM Cloud and AWS environments.

To provision an Essential plan instance, see Provisioning a watsonx.data essential instance.