IBM DSx, soon to be even more productive as Watson Studio
March 26, 2018

IBM DSx, soon to be even more productive as Watson Studio

Jim Sharpe | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Data Science Experience (DSx)

I use DSx both for internal projects as well as for clients. Depending on the situation I'll sometimes use DSx desktop and the cloud service other times. Most of my applications represent some form of analytical pipeline and are used for experimentation and/or development rather than any kind of production use.
  • DSx is particularly well suited for ML data prep. It's easy to ingest from many different kinds of sources and then perform various cleansing, transformation, and enrichment operations.
  • DSx makes collaboration with other team members very easy. Control over who can see and interact with each project is straightforward and simple to administer.
  • DSx doesn't create proprietary lock-in. Notebooks can be exported in a number of different forms to share people that don't use DSx or to run in a different environment.
  • Stability has gradually improved over the past year or so, but could still be better.
  • I'd like to see options for leveraging a GPU on the cloud-hosted version.
  • I'd like to see even more ML model lifecycle support, but it's my understanding that this is coming with the move to Watson Studio.
  • DSx has made it easier to collaborate on multiple projects with colleagues
  • It's very convenient for quick hit applications as an alternative to spinning up local containers.
I don't really see other tools that I also use such as R-Studio, eclipse, local Jupyter notebooks, PyCharm, and even Jupyter Labs as being direct competitors to DSx. Mainly because even with things like git integration, more focused on the seem to be on local development as opposed to cloud-first tooling.
DSx is a wonderful tool for certain kinds of applications such as experimenting or prototyping. It's probably not a great fit for production applications.