cloud.annotations.ai seems to be down

[ragmondo]

Can someone let me know if it will come back ? It's been off for a few days now (coincidentally along with IBM's API access for old APIs also being down).

[bourdakos1]

@akchinSTC can you check on the cluster?

[romeokienzler]

@ragmondo we've deprecated CloudAnnotations. For educational purposes I recommend to use CVStudio, which is based on CloudAnnotations https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6XCy9m24kPE - it is available if you take one of our courses https://skills.network/lab-tools/cv-studio

[SwftAIO]

@romeokienzler Is it down for good? I had a project stored on there which I cannot access now.

[bourdakos1]

you should still be able to access all your data from the cloud object storage service on cloud.ibm.com

[SwftAIO]

@bourdakos1 Thank you for the response, I can access the data however the data is unlabeled? Is the labeled data stored elsewhere?

[bourdakos1]

The labels should be stored in a file called “_annotations.json”

[SwftAIO]

@bourdakos1 Thank you so much, found it! Appreciate your time and help!

[bourdakos1]

No problem, always happy to help 😊 sorry for any headache this might have caused

[ragmondo]

Hey chaps. I do appreciate what you've done for this project and fully understand if it's become a labour of love and you've moved onto other things.. However, I'd really like to offer some pointers for this project and future projects regarding the cloud.annotations.ai site going down.

1. If you know it's going to be taken down, then please give some notice. Even a week would be better than no notice. If you have people's email address, then it would be perfectly reasonable to send them a notice.
2. Now the active site is dead, then consider replacing the dead site with just a holding page so that all the external sites that link to it don't break
3. No idea how you feel about this, but open sourcing the cluster code so we can run the labelling + export tools would be super useful. Even if the code isn't of the highest quality, it would still get some out of a jam.
4. Does anyone else know of a utility / tool that allows easy export to Apple's CreateML ??! The reason I used your service was that it was super easy to upload, annotate and import and I'm all for easy.

[romeokienzler]

1. If you know it's going to be taken down, then _please_ give some notice. Even a week would be better than no notice. If you have people's email address, then it would be perfectly reasonable to send them a notice.

You are absolutely right. If there is someone to be upset with it's me as it was my decision to take it down immediately. We had some pressure from the security department and we needed to.decide between fix forward or shutdown.

2. Now the active site is dead, then consider replacing the dead site with just a holding page so that all the external sites that link to it don't break

Let me check on this

3. No idea how you feel about this, but open sourcing the cluster code so we can run the labelling + export tools would be super useful. Even if the code isn't of the highest quality, it would still get some out of a jam.

Let me also check on this

[bourdakos1]

@ragmondo All the source for the site/cluster can be found here: https://github.com/cloud-annotations/iris

I would deploy a new cluster myself, but I no longer work at IBM and don't have access to the required client id/secret for the oauth flow (this is what is powers the "sign in with ibm cloud" button). To get around this you would need to modify the code to use an api key.

There's also an experimental local file system mode, I can put together some instructions on how to use that.

@romeokienzler is there any way you could redeploy a cluster for a couple weeks, until there is a better off-ramp in place? Was there a security issue with Cloud Annotations itself? Or was the cluster just out of date?

[bourdakos1]

I updated the instruction for using local file system version: https://github.com/cloud-annotations/iris/tree/v2

You might be able to use something like s3fs if you want too continue to use object storage for storing your images/annotations.

Just note that there's not 100% feature parity with cloud.annotations.ai yet. For example, there aren't any export options at the moment. If there's any specific features missing (like create ml export) I'm happy to work on adding them on my weekends/spare time.

[ragmondo]

Hi @bourdakos1 / Nick
It is absolutely the create ML export that made the site for me; if you do a google search you'll find a bunch of medium stories etc that recommends the service. Due to the branding / look and feel / sleek integration etc, I did actually think it was an IBM project hence the surprise when it went offline.

I'm working on just mapping one of the many other services xml or other format json files to createml format so there's no emergency. I'm toying with adding an export format to CVAT as well as that seems to be a fairly popular service. Don't break a sweat about getting anything done during evenings / weekends on my behalf though.