Artifact management

This page describes facilities that Studio provides for management of experiment artifacts. For now, artifact storage is backed by Google Cloud storage.

Basic usage

The goal of artifact management is three-fold:

  1. With no coding overhead capture data the experiment depends on (e.g. dataset).
  2. With no coding overhead save, and with minimal overhead visualize, the results of the experiment (neural network weights, etc).
  3. With minimal coding overhead make experiments reproducible on any machine (without manual data download, path correction etc).

Below we provide the examples of each use case.

Capture data

Let’s imagine that file in the current directory trains a neural network based on data located in ~/data/. In order to capture the data, we need to invoke studio run as follows:

studio run --capture-once=~/data:data

Flag --capture-once (or -co) specifies that data at path ~/data needs to be captured once at experiment startup. Additionally, the tag data (provided as a value after :) allows the script to access data in a machine-independent way, and also distinguishes the dataset in the web-ui (the Web UI page of the experiment will contain download link for tar-gzipped folder ~/data).

Save the result of the experiment

Let’s now consider an example of a python script that periodically saves some intermediate data (e.g. weights of a neural network). The following example can be made more concise using the keras or tensorflow built-in checkpointers, but we’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. Consider the following contents of file (also located in studio/examples/general/ in repo):

import numpy as np
import pickle
import os

no_samples = 100
dim_samples = 5

learning_rate = 0.01
no_steps = 10

X = np.random.random((no_samples, dim_samples))
y = np.random.random((no_samples,))

w = np.random.random((dim_samples,))

for step in range(no_steps):
    yhat =
    err = (yhat - y)
    dw =
    w -= learning_rate * dw
    loss = 0.5 *

    print("step = {}, loss = {}, L2 norm = {}".format(step, loss,

    with open(os.path.expanduser('~/weights/lr_w_{}_{}.pck'.format(step, loss)), 'w') as f:

The reader can immediately see that we are solving a linear regression problem by gradient descent and saving weights at each step to ~/weights folder.

In order to simply save the weigths, we can run the following command:

studio run --capture=~/weights:weights

Flag --capture (or -c) specifies that data from folder ~/weights needs to be captured continously - every minute (the frequency can be changed in a config file), and at the end of the experiment. In the Web ui page of the experiment we now have a link to weights artifact. This simple script should finish almost immediately, but for longer running jobs upload happens every minute of runtime (the upload happens in a separate thread, so this should not slow down the actual experiment).

Machine-independent access to the artifacts

So far we have been assuming that all experiments are being run on a local machine, and the only interaction with artifacts has been to save them for posterity’s sake. But what if our experiments are growing a bit too big to be run locally? Fortunately, Studio comes with a dockerized worker that can run your jobs on a beefy gpu server, or on a cloud instance. But how do we make local data available to such a worker? Clearly, a local path along the lines of /Users/john.doe/weights/ will not always be reproducible on a remote worker. Studio provides a way to access files in a machine-independent way, as follows. Let us replace the last three lines in the script above by:

from studio import fs_tracker
with open(os.path.join(fs_tracker.get_artifact('weights'),
        'w') as f:

We can now run the script locally, the exact same way as before:

studio run --capture=~/weights:weights

Or, if we have a worker listening to the queue work_queue:

studio run --capture=~/weights:weights --queue work_queue

In the former case, the call fs_tracker.get_artifact('weights') will simply return os.path.expanduser('~/weights'). In the latter case, a remote worker will set up a cache directory that corresponds to the artifact tagged as weights and copy existing data from storage into it (so that data can be read from that directory as well). The call fs_tracker.get_artifact('weights') will return the path to that directory. In both cases, the --experiment flag is not mandatory; if you don’t specify a name, a random uuid will be generated.

Re-using artifacts from other experiments

A neat side-benefit of using machine-independent access to the artifacts is the ability to plug different datasets into an experiment without touching the script at all - simply provide different paths for the same tag in the --capture(-once) flags. More importantly, one can reuse datasets (or any artifacts) from another experiment using the --reuse flag. First, let’s imagine we’ve run the script, this time giving the experiment a name:

studio run --capture=~/weights:weights --experiment linear_regression

Say we now want to print the L2 norm of the last set of weights. Let’s consider the following script (

import glob
import os
from studio import fs_tracker
import pickle

weights_list = glob.glob(os.path.join(fs_tracker.get_artifact('w'),'*.pck'))

with open(weights_list[-1], 'r') as f:
    w = pickle.load(f)


We can run it via

studio run --reuse=linear_regression/weights:w

The flag reuse tells studio run that artifact weights from experiment linear_regression will be used in the current experiment with a tag w. There is a bit of a catch - for download optimization, all artifacts from other experiments are considered immutable, and cached as such. If you re-run the experiment with the same name and would like to use new artifacts from it, clean the cache folder ~/.studioml/blobcache/.

Default artifacts

Each experiment gets default artifacts that it can use via fs_tracker.get_artifact() even without the --reuse or --capture(-once) flags. Those are:

  1. workspace- this artifact always gets cached to/from . folder, thus creating a copy of the working directory on a remote machine and saving the state of the scripts
  2. output- this artifact is a file with the stdout and stderr produced by running the script
  3. modeldir- it is recommended to save weights to this directory because Studio will try to do some analysis on it, such as count the number of checkpoints etc.
  4. tb- it is recommended to save Tensorboard logs to this directory, this way Studio will be able to automatically feed them into Tensorboard

All of the default artifacts are considered mutable (i.e. are stored continously). The default artifacts can be overwritten by –capture(-once) flags.

Ignoring Files

By placing an .studioml_ignore file inside the directory of the script invoked by studio run, you can specify certain directories or files to avoid being uploaded. These files will not exist in the workspace directory when the script is running remotely.

Custom storage

The Firebase API is great for small projects, but it is easy to grow beyond its free storage limits (5 Gb as of 08/02/2017), after which it becomes very expensive. Studio can utilize Google Cloud storage directly for artifact storage if your projects don’t fit into Firebase (support for Amazon S3 is on the way).

For now, the downside of using Google Cloud storage is that Google service account credentials are used, which means that all users in possession of the credential’s file have read/write access to the objects in the storage, so in principle one user can delete the experiments of another. See here for instructions on how to generate service account credentials. Once you have generated a credentials file, uncomment the “storage” section in your config.yaml file, set the type of storage to gcloud, and specify a storage bucket. Note that the bucket name needs to be unique, and an error will be thrown if a bucket with that name cannot be created. The safest approach is to create a bucket manually from the Google Cloud console, and then specify it in config.yaml. Folder/file structure within the bucket is the same as for Firebase storage, so if you want to migrate all your Firebase experiments to the new storage you can copy the Firebase storage bucket and point config.yaml to the copy (you could point config.yaml to the original, but then you’ll be paying the same Firebase prices).