Deprecations and Migrations

This page lists feature deprecations and migrations along with the steps you need to follow to manage these changes.

SENSA V6 Deprecations & Breaking Changes

Removed Support for Local Connection

We have dropped support for using the local connection type from the Console and CLI. Limited support for the local connection is still available if you're using the cortex-profiles-sdk in local mode (without access to a Fabric cluster)

Skill Building Improvements

The CLI command cortex generate is being replaced by cortex workspaces and VS Code Cortex Developer Extension. Because of this change, the Skill building process has changed as follows:

Several other changes you should be aware of are described below:

CLI command changes:

The old commands continue to function along side the new ones. The new process is considered the best practice and is documented in v6.3.0 docs forward. You may continue to use the older process which is documented in v6.2.2 backward.

Old Command	New Command
cortex generate skill	cortex workspaces generate
cortex skills save	cortex workspaces build
docker build	cortex workspaces build
docker push	cortex workspaces publish
docker tag	cortex workspaces publish
cortex actions deploy	cortex workspaces publish
cortex actions delete	no longer applicable
cortex actions describe	no longer applicable
cortex actions list	no longer applicable

Namespace deprecated from Skills, Agents, and connections

Namespace is no longer required in the naming convention for Cortex components.

To remain backward compatible the / is allowed on the backend, but it will not be allowed when creating new components in the Console.

You will not need to make changes to existing Skills, Agents, and connections.

You will be able to export and import Skills with namespaces.

This change has been made to accommodate the 60 character name limit for Kubernetes resources.

NOTE: Namespace continues to be used in the runtime by cloud providers and Kubernetes.

Datasets and Triggers

Datasets will no longer be used with connections for Agent creation. Instead a new component Data Sources has been added to SENSA Fabric. Data Sources provide flexible schema creation and data ingestion for Profiles and Agents.

Because triggers were configured as a component of datasets, they have also been deprecated. Job triggers may be set in Kubernetes.

No migration is required; install SENSA Fabric v6 to have access to these changes.

Connection Types

SENSA Fabric V6 connection types out-of-the-box are: Mongo, Hive, S3, and files. All other connection types have been deprecated. However Cdata connections are available upon request.

Studio Desktop Deprecation

The 5.0.30 release is the final version of SENSA Fabric that is compatible with the standalone Desktop installation of Studio. The Studio Agent Composer and Profile tools can now be accessed in the new web-based Console that integrates SENSA components. The Console is available at https://api.<dci-base-domain>.

The advantages to using the new Console are:

• Whenever your DCI cluster is upgraded, the Console is automatically upgraded; you no longer need to manually manage Studio versions locally.
• Because these SENSA Fabric tools are now web-based, it is easier to navigate between them.

Profiles Bulk Load Feature Migrations

A few things with regards to Profile-of-one have changed with the release of DCI v5.0.24.

Insertion Friendly Data Model

The model for documents in the attributes collection in cortex-graph database has been changed to support bulk insertion.

Profile Versions Have Changed

Previously, on DCI versions prior to v5.0.24, the versions of a profile were incremental. They started at 1 and were incremented by 1 every single time a single attribute was modified.

With the release of v5.0.24, the versions of profiles have become the unique epoch timestamps that the system learned new attribute(s) about a profile. Accordingly, multiple attributes could have been updated within the same version since the system can learn different things about a profile at the same time.

Rebuilds Are No Longer Needed

Previously, on DCI versions prior to v5.0.24, users of the graph service used to rebuild their profiles when they updated a Profile Schema.

With the release of v5.0.24, rebuilds are no longer required.

Deleting Schemas No Longer Deletes Profiles

Previously, on DCI versions prior to v5.0.24, deleting a schema would delete all the profiles associated with the schema.

With the release of v5.0.24, deleting a schema does not delete any data related to specific profiles.

Schema / Event Order Doesn't Matter

Previously, on DCI versions prior to v5.0.24, users had to save a schema before submitting events in order to create profiles.

With the release of v5.0.24, the order in which schemas are saved and events are submitted does not matter, as long as both actions are performed.

Event Structure Formalized

Previously, on DCI versions prior to v5.0.24, users could submit "informal" events, and they would still result in the creation of the appropriate attributes. This was due to the backend formalizing these events.

With the release of v5.0.24, these informal events no longer result in the creation of profile attributes if they are submitted straight to the backend. Instead, the formalization of these events is now being done by the cortex-python-profiles lib. However, this functionality will retired soon. Users of cortex-python-profiles lib that are still leveraging these informal, deprecated event structures will see the following error:

Additionally, users of the cortex-cli can no longer leverage these "informal" events.

Warning for Events Missing From Schema

Previously, on DCI versions prior to v5.0.24, when building profiles against a specific schema, users could submit events that would not build any profiles since they are not mentioned in the schema, and the backend would accept them and do nothing with them.

With the release of v5.0.24, users of the cortex-python-profiles lib will get a warning when submitting events not mentioned in the schema they are attempting to build profiles against. This error looks something like this:

Deprecation of Attribute Builders

With the release of v5.0.24, the usage of cortex_profiles.build.attributes.builders.AttributeEntityEventBuilder within the cortex-python-profiles library has been deprecated. Users should instead formulate the appropriate Entity Events based on the structures instead of using these builders.

Reverting DCI Installation After Upgrading

When a DCI instance is upgraded to v5.0.24, the Profile-of-one database is migrated as well so that users can access the profiles they built prior to upgrading their DCI installation.

If for any reasons, maintainers of the DCI installation decide that it needs to be reverted to a version prior to v5.0.24, any profiles built using the new version need incompatible with the older DCI versions and must manually be removed from the Profile-of-one database.

SENSA Libraries Migration

The SENSA Python module provides an API client library to easily integrate with SENSA Fabric. Refer to the Libraries Reference Guide documentation for details on how to install the library and the methods and classes available.

Migration steps from cortex-client to cortex-python

The cortex-python library and its optional add-ons are replacing the cortex-client library. The new libraries are more lightweight and use-case focussed. The cortex-python library may be used for development with or without the add-ons.

Uninstall the previous library (cortex-client)

Note that cortex-python cannot be installed simultaneously in your Python environment. You must uninstall the cortex-client library to use the new cortex-python library and optional add ons, cortex-python-builders and cortex-python-profiles.

pip uninstall cortex-client

Install cortex-python

The cortex-python library is available on PyPI.

To install:

pip install cortex-python

To install the optional components:

pip install cortex-python[viz]
pip install cortex-python[jupyter]
pip install cortex-python[builders]

Import Client functionalities

The way Client functionalities can be imported has changed.

To import cortex:

import cortex

To import ConnectionClient:

from cortex.connection import ConnectionClient

Upload to Managed Content

Use ManagedContentClient to upload and download to your account's managed content. In cortex-client, ConnectionClient was used for these functionalities. The methods to upload and download remain the same.

To import ManagedContentClient:

from cortex.content import ManagedContentClient

ConnectionClient can be used to save and retrieve connections.

Use SENSA magics

Cortex magics can be used only when the optional builders dependency is installed:

%reload_ext cortex_builders

Deprecations and Removals from cortex-client

1. The InputMessage and OutputMessage classes have been deprecated. Instead use the Message class:

   from cortex import Message

2. ModelClient, ModelProcess and ModelRouter have been deprecated. Instead use the experiment API in the Client class to run experiments, save and retrieve your models.

3. JobsClient has been deprecated. Instead use the action API in Client class to save or retrieve actions. Also, you can use the action in the builder class inside client class to build your actions. (Can be used only when optional dependency of builders is installed)

4. SecretsClient has been deprecated. There is no equivalent replacement functionality in the python library, but you can manage secrets through the Cortex Vault in the Admin Console or via the CLI cortex variables [command] [options].

5. Message.with_payload() has been removed. This method was previously deprecated in cortex-client v5.5.4. Instead use the Client.message() method:

   ```python
   from cortex import Cortex
   
   cortex = Cortex.client()
   message = cortex.message(payload={'value': 'hello world'})
   ```

6. LocalExperiment.set_pipeline() has been removed. This method was previously deprecated in cortex-client v5.5.0. There is no replacement method for this functionality.

7. The cortex-python package depends on fewer libraries than cortex-client. Users of cortex-client that have incrementally upgraded to different versions of the cortex-client package in the same environment are likely to have downloaded the following transitive dependencies. When cortex-python is used in place of cortex-client, these transitive dependencies will no longer be included. Accordingly, users that depend on any of the transitive dependencies must explicitly install them. The list of these transitive dependencies includes:

   Flask==1.0.2
   discovery-transitioning-utils>=1.3.50
   diskcache>=3.0.5,<3.1
   ipython>=6.4.0
   matplotlib>=2.2.2
   maya==0.5.0
   scikit-learn>=0.20.0
   seaborn>=0.9.0
   tenacity==5.0.2