We are happy to announce that a new Arkindex release is available. You can explore Arkindex and try out the newest features on our demo instance, demo.arkindex.org.

Technical release notes for developers and instance administrators are available here.

Budgets

As part of a broader plan to better control the execution costs of a project, we have started introducing a new concept of Budgets.

Along with the previously introduced worker costs, budgets will allow to keep track of the execution costs of a process as well as cancel a process if it exceeds the allowed budget. This feature will only be available in the Enterprise Edition.

In this release, only the foundation has been laid out. Budgets are only available through APIs and in the administration interface, and they are not automatically filled in from the costs of each process. They will be accessible in the frontend and will interact with processes in the next release.

This development was supported by the pictorIA consortium-HN.

Process management

In Arkindex 1.7.0, we had introduced a concept of time-to-live (TTL) to limit the execution time of each task on a process, either per project or on the whole Arkindex instance.

An undocumented worker run TTL was also available through the API, but not through the frontend. It was meant to allow finer control over each TTL in a process. This TTL has been removed in this release because it was not worth the additional complexity.

This removal may resolve some unexpected behaviors that you may have noticed with TTLs, particularly when retrying processes or applying templates.

Datasets

The Generic Training Dataset Extractor has been added as a new system worker to save some time when preparing a dataset.

This worker is used to generate the necessary dataset cache archives before training a model or running an inference worker on a dataset. This update makes it easily available on all Arkindex instances in the same way as the workers used for imports or exports.

Misc

  • All Arkindex projects now officially support Python versions from 3.10 to 3.12. Support for Python 3.10 will be dropped in future release 1.9.0. Developers can read the upgrade notes for more information on upgrading.
  • In Arkindex Enterprise Edition only, Ponos agents now use a simpler authentication method that makes setting up an agent quicker.
  • Fixed a bug that intermittently prevented selecting any project on the search page, especially when logged out.
  • The Restart button on tasks is now disabled when you do not have the necessary access rights to restart a task.