Introducing Latch Pods: Your Personal Computing Environment on the Cloud

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What are Pods?

Pods are virtual computing environments that allow you to run analysis tools like Jupyter Labs and RStudio with resource requirements (CPUs, RAM) of your choice in <5 minutes.in the browser using data stored on Latch. With Pods, you can:

• Spin up a personal virtual computer in the cloud with resource requirements (CPUs, RAM) of your choice in <5 minutes.
• Start performing downstream analyses in your familiar notebook environment.
• Get direct access to data stored on Latch.

In this tutorial, we will learn:

• How to create a Pod with specific storage and compute requirements.
• How to open a notebook, such as RStudio or Jupyter Lab, inside Pod.
• How to connect Pods with your personal computer, so you can program in your favorite development environment, such as VSCode.

After the tutorial, you will have your personal computing environment on Latch to start performing custom analyses.

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How to create and start using Pods

To create a new Pod, click the Apps dropdown and select “Create a new Pod”. You will be prompted to enter a Pod name and set up your personal computing environment.

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How to choose the right compute sizes

There are four Pod sizes that you can choose from: 4 cores and 8GiB of RAM, 8 cores and 32 GiB of RAM, 16 cores and 128 GiB of RAM, and 64 cores and 256GiB of RAM. Storage for a Pod ranges from 20 to 1000 gigabytes. For most use cases, the first option should be sufficient.

If you want to use GitHub inside Pod or access Pod from the terminal of your personal computer, continue with the advanced steps below. Otherwise, click “Launch Pod”.

Once a Pod has started, RStudio and JupyterLab will be available by default in your Pod. To access them, simply double click on the desired notebook, and copy paste the permanent endpoints from the sidebar.

Now, you will be able to open up Jupyter Labs or RStudio for downstream analyses.