Posted by Each new year is a new beginning inspiring us to think about new ways to improve BigML’s usability, which makes our platform broadly appealing to multiple user types. Having worked hard to finalize our product roadmap for 2018, part of that discussion naturally involved better ways to organize our user environments. Perhaps the most visible item we have decided to address on that front has to do with “DEV mode”. Effective Monday, January 22, 2018, Development mode will be removed from BigML Dashboard and API since we already support “Projects” to keep resources that belong together separate as needed. Anyone registering after the effective date won’t have to worry about this change, but we have some more information below for existing users.
To nip the obvious question in the bud, you will still have full access to your DEV resources as we will move DEV resources to the same environment as PROD resources under a new project named “BigML DEV Resources Archive”. That also means if you had a FREE BigML account or have been benefiting from a free account under our Education program, you will keep having uninterrupted access to all your resources without charge. If you already had DEV resources organized in various projects you’ve named yourself, we will preserve those projects as well. Furthermore, to avoid potential collisions in terms of project names between DEV and PROD environments, we will tag your migrated DEV projects as “dev-archive” so you can filter them easily by using the keywords “tags:dev-archive”.
Long-time users will remember that we launched DEV mode all the way back in 2012. The idea was simple in that we wanted to clearly demarcate a development sandbox of sorts, where users could quickly experiment with their new ideas free of charge. After all, as most of you are familiar with, Machine Learning is not a “one-shot and done” process that can be meticulously planned well in advance. On the contrary, it is a bit messy (as most creative endeavors are) and requires that you take a few steps in a new direction with each try. In hindsight, those were the days Machine Learning in the cloud sounded like “Life on Mars” does today.
Fast forward to 2018, and the world has changed quite a bit. Donald Trump is the president, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are no longer together, and North Korea has nuclear weapons — oh my! We now have a variety of subscriptions including a FREE subscription that supports datasets up to 16MB and 2 parallel tasks. Sure, 16MB is not meant for a big database dump, you don’t get an SLA, your jobs can be queued, and your resources might be deleted after a while, but it still is an excellent low cost (as in “Nada!”) way of experiencing BigML with your own data. In fact, thousands of users have been taking advantage of it all along.
Given this, we have been observing that more people are getting confused between the DEV mode and the FREE plan asking questions like “If start free, can I move my resources from DEV mode to PROD later?” or “What happens to my resources if I stop paying for my subscription?” (In case you’re wondering, we don’t immediately delete your resources in the latter case.) The removal of DEV mode will clear all these concerns and further streamline the progression from a newly signed up user to paid subscriber driving significant business value from insights discovered on BigML. As for nomenclature, FREE is free (Duh!) our paid plans are now referred to as PRIME — easy enough!
So, here you have it, we will no longer support the DEV mode as of Monday, January 22, 2018. We’ll do our best to make this as smooth a transition for all our users as possible as outlined above. However, if you do have questions we may not have covered please feel free to reach out to us at support@bigml.com anytime.
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