Release Notes 4.4 (April 2026)

Installation Control for R Packages

We’ve introduced new controls to improve how R packages are installed and managed in the Environment Editor.

• Drag-and-drop package ordering — For R (CRAN) and R (GitHub) package managers, you can now reorder packages in the Environment UI to control their installation order in the Dockerfile.

• R_REMOTES_UPGRADE flag (R CRAN) — Added to the configuration section to manage dependency upgrade behavior when installing CRAN packages.

• upgrade_dependencies flag (R GitHub) — Added to the configuration section to control dependency upgrade behavior when installing GitHub packages.

These improvements give users greater control over dependency installation and version management, helping prevent issues when package installation order matters.

RStudio CW Workspace Preservation

RStudio Cloud Workstation sessions now automatically save and restore the workspace when a session is put on hold (either manually or due to idleness) and later resumed. This ensures a more seamless workflow for RStudio users, allowing them to pause and resume without losing in-memory variables.

Configure Automation Capsule Secrets from Source Run Capsule

Users can now configure secrets for Automation Capsules directly in the source run Capsule, eliminating the need to set them up separately in the Automation Capsule. This allows all required secrets to be defined at the point where the workflow originates, simplifying setup for post-run automation workflows.

Additional UI Improvements

• Aqua - resize chat window — The docked Aqua chat panel can now be resized, with your preferred width saved across sessions.

• Collections - “Search all Internal Collections” — When no results are found in a search of the current Collection, users will now be prompted to search across all internal Collections. This makes it easier to quickly expand your search and find assets across your deployment.

Admin - Native Group Management

Admins can now create and manage user groups directly within Code Ocean, without requiring an external Identity Provider.

A new Groups Management page in the Admin Panel allows Admins to:

• Create and manage groups

• View groups synced from an Identity Provider (IdP)

This provides a flexible way to organize users and simplify sharing and collaboration, especially in deployments where IdP group synchronization is not configured.

Infrastructure Updates

Cloud Init Extension Points

Customers can customize the initialization of all Code Ocean instance types by adding scripts to SSM Parameter Store. These scripts are automatically retrieved and executed during cloud-init, enabling changes such as networking configuration or agent installation without modifying CloudFormation.

Analytics Dashboard Performance Improvement

Improved data loading performance for all analytics dashboards, leading to faster UI load times and reduced timeouts, driven by improvements to the underlying materialized views, along with an updated dashboard time range filter that now supports date-only selection.

Stack Tags Propagation Limitations

Stack’s tags that can affect the proper functionality of the system, such as Name or tag keys that start with codeocean, cloudformation, or aws, are skipped from being propagated.

Backend Services Consolidation

The backend architecture was streamlined by consolidating multiple services into a single monolithic core service, reducing the overhead of managing dependencies, versioning, and deployments across services.

Source AMI

al2023-ami-2023.10.20260216.1-kernel-6.1-x86_64