Error in creating google datalab instance

Question

I'm trying to follow the Datalab: Notebook in the Cloud video , and when executing the datalab create ai-adventures command, I encountered this error.

ERROR: (gcloud.compute.instances.create) Could not fetch resource:
 - The user does not have access to service account '*@compute-system.iam.gserviceaccount.com'.  User: '*@gmail.com'.  Ask a project owner to grant you the iam.serviceAccountUser role on the service account

Few things to note;

• I'm the project owners.
• I've tried to create a new service account tutorial@*.iam.gserviceaccount.com and that didn't work.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

---

Edit 1

Below is the information, as you can see when checking through gcloud auth list directive, I'm the owner, yet it tells me that I don't have access.

~ ⌚ 18:40:34
$ datalab create ai-adventures-3 --machine-type=n1-standard-4 --zone=us-central1-b
Creating the disk ai-adventures-3-pd
Creating the instance ai-adventures-3
ERROR: (gcloud.compute.instances.create) Could not fetch resource:
 - The user does not have access to service account '[email protected]'.  User: '[email protected]'.  Ask a project owner to grant you the iam.serviceAccountUser role on the service account

A nested call to gcloud failed, use --verbosity=debug for more info.

~ ⌚ 15:02:59
$ gcloud auth list
          Credentialed Accounts
ACTIVE  ACCOUNT
*       [email protected]
        [email protected]

To set the active account, run:
    $ gcloud config set account `ACCOUNT`



~ ⌚ 15:03:45
$

Answer 1

I tried to reproduce your error in my own project using different ways to connect to it, with different users and accounts services.

And I found something that may help you.

• First, I created a new VMInstance with OS debian-9-drawfork-v20200207.
• I logged in to this new instance through SSH
• But when I attempted to create this datalab instance with the command

datalab create --verbosity=debug example-datalab-2 --machine-type n1-standard-1

I received an error.

• Then I send the following command

gcloud auth list

And I received something like:

                  Credentialed Accounts
ACTIVE  ACCOUNT
   *   [email protected]

To set the active account, run:
    $ gcloud config set account `ACCOUNT`

It means that if I tried to create the new datalab instance with this Account Service, but this account doesn’t have the roles to create the notebook instance.

• Then I changed the user with gcloud auth login command to an account with the owner role and re-ran the datalab create command and it worked.

• To corroborate that it is working well I used the command datalab connect example-datalab-2

And I received something like

Connecting to example-datalab-2.
This will create an SSH tunnel and may prompt you to create an rsa key pair. To manage these keys, see https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/adding-removing-ssh-keys
Waiting for Datalab to be reachable at http://localhost:8081/
This tool needs to create the directory [/home/directory/.ssh] before
being able to generate SSH keys.

Do you want to continue (Y/n)?  y

Generating public/private rsa key pair.
.
.
.
Updating project ssh metadata...done.
Waiting for SSH key to propagate.

The connection to Datalab is now open and will remain until this command is killed.
Click on the *Web Preview* (square button at top-right), select *Change port > Port 8081*, and start using Datalab.

Then If I access to http://localhost:8081/ I can see:

It is worth mentioning that I received another error message at my first attempt

ERROR: (gcloud.source.repos.list) User [[email protected]] does not have permission to access project [myproject] (or it may not exist): Cloud Source Repositories API has not been used in project xxxxxxxx before or it is disabled.

I fixed this issue enabling the service with the command

gcloud beta services enable sourcerepo.googleapis.com

On the other hand, in order that you can troubleshoot this issue more accurately , I recommend to re-run the command with the following debug flag to help diagnose the problem:

datalab create --verbosity=debug datalab-instance-name

Also, I have found 2 guides that can help you with your task:

• Quickstart guide that shows you how to use the datalab command line tool to set up and open Google Cloud Datalab.

• Create a new notebook instance guide.

I hope you find this information useful.

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Edit 1

Regarding the Service Account you mentioned tutorial@*.iam.gserviceaccount.com, I’ve found the following document where it says that you can use a service account instead of the default service account to create your datalab, but you need to add the following roles:

roles/compute.instanceAdmin.v1

roles/iam.serviceAccountUser

So, please check if your SA has these roles and then you can run the same command + --service-account something like:

datalab create ai-adventures --service-account=tutorial@*.iam.gserviceaccount.com

You could see more information in the following link.

This question is more interesting than I thought and I’ve encountered several issues using Datalab, we could take in consideration that the video you mentioned has been posted on Jan 11, 2018 and as Google Cloud Platform is evolving very fast, something that could work on that date could completely change 2 years later.

With this, I recommend you to use the AI Platform Notebooks page since it has similar features as Datalab, and according with the following documentation it was released as Generally Available on March 31st, 2020.

Upon trying it out, it seems that it could fit your use case and it also has capabilities to connect to Bigquery through the use of the R notebook.