Service plan changes and deprecations

Removal of legacy projects

Starting 07 April 2022, the option to switch back to legacy projects has been removed. The projects experience has been updated to make it easier and more efficient to work and collaborate in a project. The user's work has not been affected.

Deprecation and removal of the IBM Analytics Engine classic plans and Amazon EMR

Starting 07 April 2022, new users can no longer create IBM Analytics Engine instances using the Lite, Standard-Hourly, or Standard-Monthly plans or any Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) instances in which to run notebooks. Existing users can still create instances for both services until 30 June 2022. The IBM Analytics Engine Classic plans and Amazon EMR will be removed on 9 November 2022.

Reduction in monthly CUH limit for Lite plans (29 April 2022)

All new and existing watsonx.ai Studio Lite plans have a monthly limit of 10 CUH (reduced from 50) to run jobs and tools. Because the Professional plan charges only for the CUH that you use, you can upgrade to a paid plan without incurring other charges. May 2022 is the first full month with the lower CUH limit. If you want to prolong your runtime usage, you can update your assets to use environments with lower CUH rates. For example, you can change your notebook environment.

Changes to offering plans for watsonx.ai Studio (01 April 2022)

watsonx.ai Studio now has a single paid plan, called the Professional plan, that replaces the Standard and Enterprise plans. The Professional plan charges only for compute usage, based on capacity unit hour (CUH) rates when you run tools and jobs. It does not include instance and authorized User fees. As of 1 April 2022, the Professional plan is the only paid plan option that you can select. For more information about the watsonx.ai Studio Professional plan, see watsonx.ai Studio service plans. You can also refer to IBM Cloud catalog: watsonx.ai Studio.

The Standard and Enterprise plans for watsonx.ai Studio are not an option for new accounts. Existing accounts can keep the Standard and Enterprise plans indefinitely, or can change to the Professional plan. The Professional plan includes all the features that are available with the Enterprise plan, but does not include instance or authorized user fees.

End of support for Deep Learning as a Service (watsonx.ai Runtime)

Support for Deep Learning as a Service and the Deep Learning Experiment Builder is deprecated and will be discontinued on April 2, 2022. No replacement is planned on Cloud Pak for Data as a Service, but support for Deep Learning experiments will continue to be supported on Cloud Pak for Data, with watsonx.ai Runtime Accelerator. Note that this discontinuation does not affect watsonx.ai Studio k80 GPU notebooks. You can continue to run the GPU notebooks, but Deep Learning notebooks, models, and deployments that rely on watsonx.ai Runtime REST APIs will not be supported.

End of support for Python 3.7 (watsonx.ai Studio and watsonx.ai Runtime) (25 Feb 2022)

Action required You can now use IBM Runtime 22.1, which includes the latest data science frameworks on Python 3.9, to run watsonx.ai Studio Jupyter notebooks, train models, and run watsonx.ai Runtime deployments. Python 3.7 is now deprecated and will be removed on Apr 14, 2022. Update your assets and deployments to use IBM Runtime 22.1 instead. Similarly, XL Python environments in watsonx.ai Studio and watsonx.ai Runtime are now deprecated and will also be removed on April 14th, 2022. Reassign any associated assets to supported configurations accordingly.

End of support for Spark 2.4 for watsonx.ai Studio and watsonx.ai Runtime)(27 Jan 2022)

Spark 2.4 is deprecated as a machine learning framework, notebook environment, and RStudio runtime. Update your assets to use Spark 3.0 instead. Support for training assets will be discontinued on February 16, 2022. Support for deploying and scoring models will be discontinued on March 10, 2022 and existing deployments using Spark 2.4 specifications will be removed.

Deprecation of the profiling support for unstructured data (10 October 2023)

Starting on 10 October 2023, profiling of data assets that contain unstructured data, such as Microsoft Word, PDF, HTML, and plain text documents, is deprecated. After that date, newly added unstructured data assets will no longer be profiled. Existing profiles will be available while the respective data assets live in the project or catalog.

New and updated plans (05 May 2022)

Starting on 05 May 2022, you can choose from the following new IBM Knowledge Catalog offering plans:

• The new Standard plan charges per catalog asset and for compute usage, based on capacity unit hour (CUH) rates when you run profiling, tools, and jobs. The plan does not include monthly instance fees or authorized user fees.
• The new Enterprise Bundle plan charges a monthly instance fee for 100,000 catalog assets and 2500 CUH per month. You pay for more catalog assets and compute usage. The plan does not include authorized user fees.

If you have the Lite plan, your plan is automatically updated. You now have access to most IBM Knowledge Catalog features. Many of the limits for assets and governance artifacts are increased. However, the monthly compute usage limit is decreased to 25 CUH.

If you previously provisioned the Standard, Professional, or Enterprise plan, you can keep your legacy plan for the next year. If you want to change to the new Standard or Enterprise Bundle plan, you can follow the steps for Managing services.

See IBM Knowledge Catalog service plans.

Removal of legacy governance artifacts experience (08 April 2022)

On 8 April 2022, the legacy governance artifacts experience was removed and all users switched to the new governance artifacts experience. You had the legacy experience only if you provisioned IBM Knowledge Catalog before April 2021 and you hadn't already moved to the new experience.

Here's what happened during the move:

• All your existing business terms, policies, and data protection rules were permanently deleted. You can't revert to the legacy experience.
• All business term, data classes, and classification assignments on data assets became invalid.
• Any data masking that you configured with data protection rules was removed.
• Profiles of data assets are updated so that the classification results use the new data classes.

Action required Here's what you need to do now:

• Re-create your business terms, classifications, and data protection rules.
• Remove invalid business terms and classification assignment from assets in catalogs.
• Assign your new business terms and classification to assets in catalogs.
• Assign IBM Knowledge Catalog roles to your users. See Assign IBM Knowledge Catalog roles to users.

If you have any questions or concerns related to moving to new version of governance artifacts, you can open a support ticket.

Plan addition for DataStage-aaS Anywhere (9 November 2023)

With DataStage-aaS Anywhere, you can use Datastage's low-code/no-code canvas to build ETL and ELT pipelines and run them on a remote runtime engine. Data integration jobs are executed wherever the DataStage remote runtime engine resides: in any location, on-premises or on any cloud. The new pricing plans for DataStage-aaS Anywhere are available on the IBM Cloud Catalog.

Removal of prebuilt Satellite locations for DataStage flows (11 April 2022)

Prebuilt satellite locations for DataStage flows is removed. As of 11 April 2022, you can no longer run DataStage jobs using resources at prebuilt Satellite locations.

New pricing plans for Watson Query (1 May 2022)

Enterprise pricing has changed to remove charges per Watson Query instance and to lower charges for Virtual Processor Core (VPC) hours for your Watson Query service. The service is metered and consumed when it is provisioned, even when you are not working in the service. The 250 free Virtual Processor Core-Hours per month has been discontinued. See Watson Query offering plans.

Parent topic: What's new