Environments

Introduction

Environments are a secure mechanism used to define environment variables. Environment variables hold the values related to a certain environment and they are made available to a specific workflow from the UP42 platform.

Environment variables enable using external services and/or setting specific values that are used repeatedly in a given workflow. The examples below will give you more insights about the advantages of using environment variables.

Environments are mostly used in three cases: connect with external storage systems, connect with third-party data services and connect with third-party processing services.

Connect with External Storage Systems

If you are exchanging data with an external storage system such as AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage or your own storage system, you can pass the credentials of these services as environment variables in the UP42 platform. This enables the connection between the external storage system and the data or processing block, which will either push or pull data from the storage.

For more information: How to Create Environment Variables.

Connect with Third-Party Data Services

If you have a subscription to a third-party data service such as OneAtlas, you can use this subscription by passing the credentials as environment variables in the UP42 platform. This enables the connection between the data subscription and your workflow, which allows you to access OneAtlas data based on this subscription and avoid consuming UP42 credits for data usage. The only credits consumed are for the infrastructure costs during the job run and they are usually negligible (1-2 UP42 credits).

This method is valid for any other data provider from the UP42 Marketplace. For more information: How to Create Environment Variables.

Connect with Third-Party Processing Services

If you have an extremely computationally intensive algorithm that runs on your dedicated hardware or on an external cloud infrastructure, then you could get the data through the UP42 marketplace, use our workflow orchestration capabilities and offload the intensive computation into your HPC cluster. To access that resource, you need to pass the credentials as environment variables and enable the access to the computing resource.

For more information: How to Create Environment Variables.