Configure jobs using queue environments

AWS Deadline Cloud uses queue environments to configure the software on your workers. An environment enables you to perform time-consuming tasks, such as set up and tear-down, once for all the tasks in a session. It defines the actions to run on a worker when starting or stopping a session. You can configure an environment for a queue, jobs that run in the queue, and the individual steps for a job.

You define environments as queue environments or job environments. Create queue environments with the Deadline Cloud console or with the deadline:CreateQueueEnvironment operation and define job environments in the job templates of the jobs you submit. They follow the Open Job Description (OpenJD) specification for environments. For details, see <Environment> in the OpenJD specification on GitHub.

In addition to a name and description, each environment contains two fields that define the environment on the host. They are:

You must set at least one of script or variables.

You can define more than one environment in your job template. Each environment is applied in the order that they are listed in the template. You can use this to help manage the complexity of your environments.

The default queue environment for Deadline Cloud uses the conda package manager to load software into the environment, but you can use other package managers. The default environment defines two parameters to specify the software that should be loaded. These variables are set by submitters provided by Deadline Cloud, though you can set them in your own scripts and applications that use the default environment. They are: