Ora-lytics

OCI Data Science – Initial Setup and Configuration

Posted on February 12, 2020 Updated on February 12, 2020

After a very, very, very long wait (18+ months) Oracle OCI Data Science platform is now available.

But before you jump straight into using OCI Data Science, there is a little bit of setup required for your Cloud Tenancy. There is the easy simple approach and then there is the slightly more involved approach. These are

• Simple approach. Assuming you are just going to use the root tenancy and compartment, you just need to setup a new policy to enable the use of the OCI Data Science services. This assuming you have your VNC configuration complete with NAT etc. This can be done by creating a policy with the following policy statement. After creating this you can proceed with creating your first notebook in OCI Data Science.

allow service datascience to use virtual-network-family in tenancy

• Slightly more complicated approach. When you get into having a team based approach you will need to create some additional Oracle Cloud components to manage them and what resources are allocated to them. This involved creating Compartments, allocating users, VNCs, Policies etc. The following instructions brings you through these steps

IMPORTANT: After creating a Compartment or some of the other things listed below, and they are not displayed in the expected drop-down lists etc, then either refresh your screen or log-out and log back in again!

1. Create a Group for your Data Science Team & Add Users

The first step involves creating a Group to ‘group’ the various users who will be using the OCI Data Science services.

Go to Governance and Administration ->Identity and click on Groups.

Enter some basic descriptive information. I called my Group, ‘my-data-scientists’.

Now click on your Group in the list of Groups and add the users to the group.

You may need to create the accounts for the various users.

2. Create a Compartment for your Data Science work

Now create a new Compartment to own the network resources and the Data Science resources.

Go to Governance and Administration ->Identity and click on Compartments.

Enter some basic descriptive information. I’ve called my compartment, ‘My-DS-Compartment’.

3. Create Network for your Data Science work

Creating and setting up the VNC can be a little bit of fun. You can do it the manual way whereby you setup and configure everything. Or you can use the wizard to do this. I;m going to show the wizard approach below.

But the first thing you need to do is to select the Compartment the VNC will belong to. Select this from the drop-down list on the left hand side of the Virtual Cloud Network page. If your compartment is not listed, then log-out and log-in!

To use the wizard approach click the Networking QuickStart button.

Select the option ‘VCN with Internet Connectivity and click Start Workflow, as you will want to connect to it and to allow the service to connect to other cloud services.

I called my VNC ‘My-DS-vnc’ and took the default settings. Then click the Next button.

The next screen shows a summary of what will be done. Click the Create button, and all of these networking components will be created.

All done with creating the VNC.

4. Create required Policies enable OCI Data Science for your Compartment

There are three policies needed to allocated the necessary resources to the various components we have just created. To create these go to Governance and Administration ->Identity and click on Policies.

Select your Compartment from the drop-down list. This should be ‘My-DS-Compartment’, then click on Create Policy.

The first policy allocates a group to a compartment for the Data Science services. I called this policy, ‘DS-Manage-Access’.

allow group My-data-scientists to manage data-science-family in compartment My-DS-Compartment

The next policy is to give the Data Science users access to the network resources. I called this policy, ‘DS-Manage-Network’.

allow group My-data-scientists to use virtual-network-family in compartment My-DS-Compartment

And the third policy is to give Data Science service access to the network resources. I called this policy, ‘DS-Network-Access’.

allow service datascience to use virtual-network-family in compartment My-DS-Compartment

Job Done 🙂

You are now setup to run the OCI Data Science service.  Check out my Blog Post on creating your first OCI Data Science Notebook and exploring what is available in this Notebook.