Tag Archives: Amazon Sagemaker

How Chime Financial uses AWS to build a serverless stream analytics platform and defeat fraudsters

Post Syndicated from Khandu Shinde original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/how-chime-financial-uses-aws-to-build-a-serverless-stream-analytics-platform-and-defeat-fraudsters/

This is a guest post by Khandu Shinde, Staff Software Engineer and Edward Paget, Senior Software Engineering at Chime Financial.

Chime is a financial technology company founded on the premise that basic banking services should be helpful, easy, and free. Chime partners with national banks to design member first financial products. This creates a more competitive market with better, lower-cost options for everyday Americans who aren’t being served well by traditional banks. We help drive innovation, inclusion, and access across the industry.

Chime has a responsibility to protect our members against unauthorized transactions on their accounts. Chime’s Risk Analysis team constantly monitors trends in our data to find patterns that indicate fraudulent transactions.

This post discusses how Chime utilizes AWS Glue, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon SageMaker to build an online, serverless fraud detection solution — the Chime Streaming 2.0 system.

Problem statement

In order to keep up with the rapid movement of fraudsters, our decision platform must continuously monitor user events and respond in real-time. However, our legacy data warehouse-based solution was not equipped for this challenge. It was designed to manage complex queries and business intelligence (BI) use cases on a large scale. However, with a minimum data freshness of 10 minutes, this architecture inherently didn’t align with the near real-time fraud detection use case.

To make high-quality decisions, we need to collect user event data from various sources and update risk profiles in real time. We also need to be able to add new fields and metrics to the risk profiles as our team identifies new attacks, without needing engineering intervention or complex deployments.

We decided to explore streaming analytics solutions where we can capture, transform, and store event streams at scale, and serve rule-based fraud detection models and machine learning (ML) models with milliseconds latency.

Solution overview

The following diagram illustrates the design of the Chime Streaming 2.0 system.

The design included the following key components:

  1. We have Amazon Kinesis Data Streams as our streaming data service to capture and store event streams at scale. Our stream pipelines capture various event types, including user enrollment events, user login events, card swipe events, peer-to-peer payments, and application screen actions.
  2. Amazon DynamoDB is another data source for our Streaming 2.0 system. It acts as the application backend and stores data such as blocked devices list and device-user mapping. We mainly use it as lookup tables in our pipeline.
  3. AWS Glue jobs form the backbone of our Streaming 2.0 system. The simple AWS Glue icon in the diagram represents thousands of AWS Glue jobs performing different transformations. To achieve the 5-15 seconds end-to-end data freshness service level agreement (SLA) for the Steaming 2.0 pipeline, we use streaming ETL jobs in AWS Glue to consume data from Kinesis Data Streams and apply near-real-time transformation. We choose AWS Glue mainly due to its serverless nature, which simplifies infrastructure management with automatic provisioning and worker management, and the ability to perform complex data transformations at scale.
  4. The AWS Glue streaming jobs generate derived fields and risk profiles that get stored in Amazon DynamoDB. We use Amazon DynamoDB as our online feature store due to its millisecond performance and scalability.
  5. Our applications call Amazon SageMaker Inference endpoints for fraud detections. The Amazon DynamoDB online feature store supports real-time inference with single digit millisecond query latency.
  6. We use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as our offline feature store. It contains historical user activities and other derived ML features.
  7. Our data scientist team can access the dataset and perform ML model training and batch inferencing using Amazon SageMaker.

AWS Glue pipeline implementation deep dive

There are several key design principles for our AWS Glue Pipeline and the Streaming 2.0 project.

  • We want to democratize our data platform and make the data pipeline accessible to all Chime developers.
  • We want to implement cloud financial backend services and achieve cost efficiency.

To achieve data democratization, we needed to enable different personas in the organization to use the platform and define transformation jobs quickly, without worrying about the actual implementation details of the pipelines. The data infrastructure team built an abstraction layer on top of Spark and integrated services. This layer contained API wrappers over integrated services, job tags, scheduling configurations and debug tooling, hiding Spark and other lower-level complexities from end users. As a result, end users were able to define jobs with declarative YAML configurations and define transformation logic with SQL. This simplified the onboarding process and accelerated the implementation phase.

To achieve cost efficiency, our team built a cost attribution dashboard based on AWS cost allocation tags. We enforced tagging with the above abstraction layer and had clear cost attribution for all AWS Glue jobs down to the team level. This enabled us to track down less optimized jobs and work with job owners to implement best practices with impact-based priority. One common misconfiguration we found was sizing of AWS Glue jobs. With data democratization, many users lacked the knowledge to right-size their AWS Glue jobs. The AWS team introduced AWS Glue auto scaling to us as a solution. With AWS Glue Auto Scaling, we no longer needed to plan AWS Glue Spark cluster capacity in advance. We could just set the maximum number of workers and run the jobs. AWS Glue monitors the Spark application execution, and allocates more worker nodes to the cluster in near-real time after Spark requests more executors based on our workload requirements. We noticed a 30–45% cost saving across our AWS Glue Jobs once we turned on Auto Scaling.

Conclusion

In this post, we showed you how Chime’s Streaming 2.0 system allows us to ingest events and make them available to the decision platform just seconds after they are emitted from other services. This enables us to write better risk policies, provide fresher data for our machine learning models, and protect our members from unauthorized transactions on their accounts.

Over 500 developers in Chime are using this streaming pipeline and we ingest more than 1 million events per second. We follow the sizing and scaling process from the AWS Glue streaming ETL jobs best practices blog and land on a 1:1 mapping between Kinesis Shard and vCPU core. The end-to-end latency is less than 15 seconds, and it improves the model score calculation speed by 1200% compared to legacy implementation. This system has proven to be reliable, performant, and cost-effective at scale.

We hope this post will inspire your organization to build a real-time analytics platform using serverless technologies to accelerate your business goals.


About the Authors

Khandu Shinde Khandu Shinde is a Staff Engineer focused on Big Data Platforms and Solutions for Chime. He helps to make the platform scalable for Chime’s business needs with architectural direction and vision. He’s based in San Francisco where he plays cricket and watches movies.

Edward Paget Edward Paget is a Software Engineer working on building Chime’s capabilities to mitigate risk to ensure our members’ financial peace of mind. He enjoys being at the intersection of big data and programming language theory. He’s based in Chicago where he spends his time running along the lake shore.

Dylan Qu is a Specialist Solutions Architect focused on Big Data & Analytics with Amazon Web Services. He helps customers architect and build highly scalable, performant, and secure cloud-based solutions on AWS.

AWS Weekly Roundup: Farewell EC2-Classic, EBS at 15 Years, and More (Sept. 4, 2023)

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-farewell-ec2-classic-ebs-at-15-years-and-more-sept-4-2023/

Last week, there was some great reading about Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) written by AWS tech leaders.

Dr. Werner Vogels wrote Farewell EC2-Classic, it’s been swell, celebrating the 17 years of loyal duty of the original version that started what we now know as cloud computing. You can read how it made the process of acquiring compute resources simple, even though the stack running behind the scenes was incredibly complex.

We have come a long way since 2006, and we’re not done innovating for our customers. As celebrated in this year’s AWS Storage Day, Amazon EBS was launched 15 years ago this month. James Hamilton, SVP and distinguished engineer at Amazon, wrote Amazon EBS at 15 Years, about how the service has evolved to handle over 100 trillion I/O operations a day, and transfers over 13 exabytes of data daily.

As Dr. Werner said in his piece, “it’s a reminder that building evolvable systems is a strategy, and revisiting your architectures with an open mind is a must.” Our innovation efforts driven by customer feedback continue today, and this week is no different.

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some launches that got my attention:

Renaming Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics to Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink – You can now use Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink, a fully managed and serverless service for you to build and run real-time streaming applications using Apache Flink. All your existing running applications in Kinesis Data Analytics will work as-is, without any changes. To learn more, see my blog post.

Extended Support for Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS – You can now get more time for support, up to three years, for Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS database instances running MySQL 5.7, PostgreSQL 11, and higher major versions. This e will allow you time to upgrade to a new major version to help you meet your business requirements even after the community ends support for these versions.

Enhanced Starter Template for AWS Step Functions Workflow Studio – You can now use starter templates to streamline the process of creating and prototyping workflows swiftly, plus a new code mode, which enables builders to move easily between design and code authoring views. With the improved authoring experience in Workflow Studio, you can seamlessly alternate between a drag-and-drop visual builder experience or the new code editor so that you can pick your preferred tool to accelerate development.

To learn more, see Enhancing Workflow Studio with new features for streamlined authoring in the AWS Compute Blog.

Email Delivery History for Every Email in Amazon SES – You can now troubleshoot individual email delivery problems, confirm delivery of critical messages, and identify engaged recipients on a granular, single email basis. Email senders can investigate trends in delivery performance and see delivery and engagement status for each email sent using Amazon SES Virtual Deliverability Manager.

Response Streaming through Amazon SageMaker Real-time Inference – You can now continuously stream inference responses back to the client to help you build interactive experiences for various generative AI applications such as chatbots, virtual assistants, and music generators.

For more details on how to use response streaming along with examples, see Invoke to Stream an Inference Response and How containers should respond in the AWS documentation, and Elevating the generative AI experience: Introducing streaming support in Amazon SageMaker hosting in the AWS Machine Learning Blog.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS News
Some other updates and news that you might have missed:

AI & Sports: How AWS & the NFL are Changing the Game – Over the last 5 years, AWS has partnered with the National Football League (NFL), helping fans better understand the game, helping broadcasters tell better stories, and helping teams use data to improve operations and player safety. Watch AWS CEO, Adam Selipsky, former NFL All-Pro Larry Fitzgerald, and the NFL Network’s Cynthia Frelund during their earlier livestream discussing the intersection of artificial intelligence and machine learning in sports.

Amazon Bedrock Story from Amazon Science – This is a good article explaining the benefits of using Amazon Bedrock to build and scale generative AI applications with leading foundation models, including Amazon’s Titan FMs, which focus on responsible AI to avoid toxic content.

Amazon EC2 Flexibility Score – This is an open source tool developed by AWS to assess any configuration used to launch instances through an Auto Scaling Group (ASG) against the recommended EC2 best practices. It converts the best practice adoption into a “flexibility score” that can be used to identify, improve, and monitor the configurations.

To learn more open-source news and updates, see this newsletter curated by my colleague Ricardo to bring you the latest open source projects, posts, events, and more.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

AWS re:InventAWS re:Invent 2023Ready to start planning your re:Invent? Browse the session catalog now. Join us to hear the latest from AWS, learn from experts, and connect with the global cloud community.

AWS Global SummitsAWS Summits – The last in-person AWS Summit will be held in Johannesburg on Sept. 26.

AWS Community Days AWS Community Day– Join a community-led conference run by AWS user group leaders in your region: Aotearoa (Sept. 6), Lebanon (Sept. 9), Munich (Sept. 14), Argentina (Sept. 16), Spain (Sept. 23), and Chile (Sept. 30). Visit the landing page to check out all the upcoming AWS Community Days.

CDK Day – A community-led fully virtual event on Sept. 29 with tracks in English and Spanish about CDK and related projects. Learn more at the website.

You can browse all upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events, and developer-focused events such as AWS DevDay.

Channy

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

AWS Weekly Roundup – AWS Dedicated Zones, Events and More – August 28, 2023

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-aws-dedicated-zones-events-and-more-august-28-2023/

This week, I will meet our customers and partners at the AWS Summit Mexico. If you are around, please come say hi at the community lounge and at the F1 Game Day where I will spend most of my time. I would love to discuss your developer experience on AWS and listen to your stories about building on AWS.

Last Week’s Launches
I am amazed at how quickly service teams are deploying services to the new il-central-1 Region, aka AWS Israel (Tel-Aviv) Region. I counted no fewer than 25 new service announcements since we opened the Region on August 1, including ten just for last week!

In addition to these developments in the new Region, here are some launches that got my attention during the previous week.

AWS Dedicated Local Zones – Just like Local Zones, Dedicated Local Zones are a type of AWS infrastructure that is fully managed by AWS. Unlike Local Zones, they are built for exclusive use by you or your community and placed in a location or data center specified by you to help comply with regulatory requirements. I think about them as a portion of AWS infrastructure dedicated to my exclusive usage.

Enhanced search on AWS re:Post – AWS re:Post is a cloud knowledge service. The enhanced search experience helps you locate answers and discover articles more quickly. Search results are now presenting a consolidated view of all AWS knowledge on re:Post. The view shows AWS Knowledge Center articles, question and answers, and community articles that are relevant to the user’s search query.

Amazon QuickSight supports scheduled programmatic export to Microsoft ExcelAmazon QuickSight now supports scheduled generation of Excel workbooks by selecting multiple tables and pivot table visuals from any sheet of a dashboard. Snapshot Export APIs will now also support programmatic export to Excel format, in addition to Paginated PDF and CSV.

Amazon WorkSpaces announced a new client to support Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 – The new client, powered by WorkSpaces Streaming Protocol (WSP), improves the remote desktop experience by offering enhanced web conferencing functionality, better multi-monitor support, and a more user-friendly interface. To get started, simply download the new Linux client versions from Amazon WorkSpaces client download website.

Amazon Sagemaker CPU/GPU profiler – We launched the preview of Amazon SageMaker Profiler, an advanced observability tool for large deep learning workloads. With this new capability, you are able to access granular compute hardware-related profiling insights for optimizing model training performance.

Amazon Sagemaker rolling deployments strategy – You can now update your Amazon SageMaker Endpoints using a rolling deployment strategy. Rolling deployment makes it easier for you to update fully-scaled endpoints that are deployed on hundreds of popular accelerated compute instances.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS News
Some other updates and news that you might have missed:

On-demand Container Loading in AWS Lambda – This one is not new from this week, but I spotted it while I was taking a few days of holidays. Marc Brooker and team were awarded Best Paper by USENIX Association for On-demand Container Loading in AWS Lambda (pdf). They explained in detail the challenges of loading (huge) container images in AWS Lambda. A must-read if you’re curious how Lambda functions work behind the scenes (pdf).

The Official AWS Podcast – Listen each week for updates on the latest AWS news and deep dives into exciting use cases. There are also official AWS podcasts in several languages. Check out the ones in FrenchGermanItalian, and Spanish.

AWS Open Source News and Updates – This is a newsletter curated by my colleague Ricardo to bring you the latest open source projects, posts, events, and more.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

AWS Hybrid Cloud & Edge Day (August 30) – Join a free-to-attend one-day virtual event to hear the latest hybrid cloud and edge computing trends, emerging technologies, and learn best practices from AWS leaders, customers, and industry analysts. To learn more, see the detail agenda and register now.

AWS Global SummitsAWS Summits – The 2023 AWS Summits season is almost ending with the last two in-person events in Mexico City (August 30) and Johannesburg (September 26).

AWS re:Invent – But don’t worry because re:Invent season (November 27–December 1) is coming closer. Join us to hear the latest from AWS, learn from experts, and connect with the global cloud community. Registration is now open.

AWS Community Days AWS Community Day– Join a community-led conference run by AWS user group leaders in your region: Aotearoa (September 6), Lebanon (September 9), Munich (September 14), Argentina (September 16), Spain (September 23), and Chile (September 30). Visit the landing page to check out all the upcoming AWS Community Days.

CDK Day (September 29) – A community-led fully virtual event with tracks in English and Spanish about CDK and related projects. Learn more at the website.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Week in Review!

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

— seb

Improving medical imaging workflows with AWS HealthImaging and SageMaker

Post Syndicated from Sukhomoy Basak original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/improving-medical-imaging-workflows-with-aws-healthimaging-and-sagemaker/

Medical imaging plays a critical role in patient diagnosis and treatment planning in healthcare. However, healthcare providers face several challenges when it comes to managing, storing, and analyzing medical images. The process can be time-consuming, error-prone, and costly.

There’s also a radiologist shortage across regions and healthcare systems, making the demand for this specialty increases due to an aging population, advances in imaging technology, and the growing importance of diagnostic imaging in healthcare.

As the demand for imaging studies continues to rise, the limited number of available radiologists results in delays in available appointments and timely diagnoses. And while technology enables healthcare delivery improvements for clinicians and patients, hospitals seek additional tools to solve their most pressing challenges, including:

  • Professional burnout due to an increasing demand for imaging and diagnostic services
  • Labor-intensive tasks, such as volume measurement or structural segmentation of images
  • Increasing expectations from patients expecting high-quality healthcare experiences that match retail and technology in terms of convenience, ease, and personalization

To improve clinician and patient experiences, run your picture archiving and communication system (PACS) with an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled diagnostic imaging cloud solution to securely gain critical insights and improve access to care.

AI helps reduce the radiologist burndown rate through automation. For example, AI saves radiologist chest x-ray interpretation time. It is also a powerful tool to identify areas that need closer inspection, and helps capture secondary findings that weren’t initially identified. The advancement of interoperability and analytics gives radiologist a 360-degree, longitudinal view of patient health records to provide better healthcare at potentially lower costs.

AWS offers services to address these challenges. This blog post discusses AWS HealthImaging (AWS AHI) and Amazon SageMaker, and how they are used together to improve healthcare providers’ medical imaging workflows. This ultimately accelerates imaging diagnostics and increases radiology productivity. AWS AHI enables developers to deliver performance, security, and scale to cloud-native medical imaging applications. It allows ingestion of Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) images. Amazon SageMaker provides end-to-end solution for AI and machine learning.

Let’s explore an example use case involving X-rays after an auto accident. In this diagnostic medical imaging workflow, a patient is in the emergency room. From there:

  • The patient undergoes an X-ray to check for fractures.
  • The scanned acquisition device images flow to the PACS system.
  • The radiologist reviews the information gathered from this procedure and authors the report.
  • The patient workflow continues as the reports are made available to the referring physician.

Next-generation imaging solutions and workflows

Healthcare providers can use AWS AHI and Amazon SageMaker together to enable next-generation imaging solutions and improve medical imaging workflows. The following architecture illustrates this example.

X-ray images are sent to AWS HealthImaging and an Amazon SageMaker endpoint extracts insights.

Figure 1: X-ray images are sent to AWS HealthImaging and an Amazon SageMaker endpoint extracts insights.

Let’s review the architecture and the key components:

1. Imaging Scanner: Captures the images from a patient’s body. Depending on the modality, this can be an X-ray detector; a series of detectors in a CT scanner; a magnetic field and radio frequency coils in an MRI scanner; or an ultrasound transducer. This example uses an X-ray device.

2. Amazon SQS message queue: Consumes event from S3 bucket and triggers an AWS Step Functions workflow orchestration.

3. AWS Step Functions runs the transform and import jobs to further process and import the images into AWS AHI data store instance.

4. The final diagnostic image—along with any relevant patient information and metadata—is stored in the AWS AHI datastore. This allows for efficient imaging date retrieval and management. It also enables medical imaging data access with sub-second image retrieval latencies at scale, powered by cloud-native APIs and applications from AWS partners.

5. Radiologists responsible for ground truth for ML images perform medical image annotations using Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth. They visualize and label DICOM images using a custom data labeling workflow—a fully managed data labeling service that supports built-in or custom data labeling workflows. They also leverage tools like 3D Slicer for interactive medical image annotations.

6. Data scientists build or leverage built-in deep learning models using the annotated images on Amazon SageMaker. SageMaker offers a range of deployment options that vary from low latency and high throughput to long-running inference jobs. These options include considerations for batch, real-time, or near real-time inference.

7. Healthcare providers use AWS AHI and Amazon SageMaker to run AI-assisted detection and interpretation workflow. This workflow is used to identify hard-to-see fractures, dislocations, or soft tissue injuries to allow surgeons and radiologist to be more confident in their treatment choices.

8. Finally, the image stored in AWS AHI is displayed on a monitor or other visual output device where it can be analyzed and interpreted by a radiologist or other medical professional.

  • The Open Health Imaging Foundation (OHIF) Viewer is an open source, web-based, medical imaging platform. It provides a core framework for building complex imaging applications.
  • Radical Imaging or Arterys are AWS partners that provide OHIF-based medical imaging viewer.

Each of these components plays a critical role in the overall performance and accuracy of the medical imaging system as well as ongoing research and development focused on improving diagnostic outcomes and patient care. AWS AHI uses efficient metadata encoding, lossless compression, and progressive resolution data access to provide industry leading performance for loading images. Efficient metadata encoding enables image viewers and AI algorithms to understand the contents of a DICOM study without having to load the image data.

Security

The AWS shared responsibility model applies to data protection in AWS AHI and Amazon SageMaker.

Amazon SageMaker is HIPAA-eligible and can operate with data containing Protected Health Information (PHI). Encryption of data in transit is provided by SSL/TLS and is used when communicating both with the front-end interface of Amazon SageMaker (to the Notebook) and whenever Amazon SageMaker interacts with any other AWS services.

AWS AHI is also HIPAA-eligible service and provides access control at the metadata level, ensuring that each user and application can only see the images and metadata fields that are required based upon their role. This prevents the proliferation of Patient PHI. All access to AWS AHI APIs is logged in detail in AWS CloudTrail.

Both of these services leverage AWS Key Management service (AWS KMS) to satisfy the requirement that PHI data is encrypted at rest.

Conclusion

In this post, we reviewed a common use case for early detection and treatment of conditions, resulting in better patient outcomes. We also covered an architecture that can transform the radiology field by leveraging the power of technology to improve accuracy, efficiency, and accessibility of medical imaging.

Further reading

Content Repository for Unstructured Data with Multilingual Semantic Search: Part 2

Post Syndicated from Patrik Nagel original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/content-repository-for-unstructured-data-with-multilingual-semantic-search-part-2/

Leveraging vast unstructured data poses challenges, particularly for global businesses needing cross-language data search. In Part 1 of this blog series, we built the architectural foundation for the content repository. The key component of Part 1 was the dynamic access control-based logic with a web UI to upload documents.

In Part 2, we extend the content repository with multilingual semantic search capabilities while maintaining the access control logic from Part 1. This allows users to ingest documents in content repository across multiple languages and then run search queries to get reference to semantically similar documents.

Solution overview

Building on the architectural foundation from Part 1, we introduce four new building blocks to extend the search functionality.

Optical character recognition (OCR) workflow: To automatically identify, understand, and extract text from ingested documents, we use Amazon Textract and a sample review dataset of .png format documents (Figure 1). We use Amazon Textract synchronous application programming interfaces (APIs) to capture key-value pairs for the reviewid and reviewBody attributes. Based on your specific requirements, you can choose to capture either the complete extracted text or parts the text.

Sample document for ingestion

Figure 1. Sample document for ingestion

Embedding generation: To capture the semantic relationship between the text, we use a machine learning (ML) model that maps words and sentences to high-dimensional vector embeddings. You can use Amazon SageMaker, a fully-managed ML service, to build, train, and deploy your ML models to production-ready hosted environments. You can also deploy ready-to-use pre-trained models from multiple avenues such as SageMaker JumpStart. For this blog post, we use the open-source pre-trained universal-sentence-encoder-multilingual model from TensorFlow Hub. The model inference endpoint deployed to a SageMaker endpoint generates embeddings for the document text and the search query. Figure 2 is an example of n-dimensional vector that is generated as the output of the reviewBody attribute text provided to the embeddings model.

Sample embedding representation of the value of reviewBody

Figure 2. Sample embedding representation of the value of reviewBody

Embedding ingestion: To make the embeddings searchable for the content repository users, you can use the k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) search feature of Amazon OpenSearch Service. The OpenSearch k-NN plugin provides different methods. For this blog post, we use the Approximate k-NN search approach, based on the Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) algorithm. HNSW uses a hierarchical set of proximity graphs in multiple layers to improve performance when searching large datasets to find the “nearest neighbors” for the search query text embeddings.

Semantic search: We make the search service accessible as an additional backend logic on Amazon API Gateway. Authenticated content repository users send their search query using the frontend to receive the matching documents. The solution maintains end-to-end access control logic by using the user’s enriched Amazon Cognito provided identity (ID) token claim with the department attribute to compare it with the ingested documents.

Technical architecture

The technical architecture includes two parts:

  1. Implementing multilingual semantic search functionality: Describes the processing workflow for the document that the user uploads; makes the document searchable.
  2. Running input search query: Covers the search workflow for the input query; finds and returns the nearest neighbors of the input text query to the user.

Part 1. Implementing multilingual semantic search functionality

Our previous blog post discussed blocks A through D (Figure 3), including user authentication, ID token enrichment, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) object tags for dynamic access control, and document upload to the source S3 bucket. In the following section, we cover blocks E through H. The overall workflow describes how an unstructured document is ingested in the content repository, run through the backend OCR and embeddings generation process and finally the resulting vector embedding are stored in OpenSearch service.

Technical architecture for implementing multi-lingual semantic search functionality

Figure 3. Technical architecture for implementing multilingual semantic search functionality

  1. The OCR workflow extracts text from your uploaded documents.
    • The source S3 bucket sends an event notification to Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS).
    • The document transformation AWS Lambda function subscribed to the Amazon SQS queue invokes an Amazon Textract API call to extract the text.
  2. The document transformation Lambda function makes an inference request to the encoder model hosted on SageMaker. In this example, the Lambda function submits the reviewBody attribute to the encoder model to generate the embedding.
  3. The document transformation Lambda function writes an output file in the transformed S3 bucket. The text file consists of:
    • The reviewid and reviewBody attributes extracted from Step 1
    • An additional reviewBody_embeddings attribute from Step 2
      Note: The workflow tags the output file with the same S3 object tags as the source document for downstream access control.
  4. The transformed S3 bucket sends an event notification to invoke the indexing Lambda function.
  5. The indexing Lambda function reads the text file content. Then indexing Lambda function makes an OpenSearch index API call along with source document tag as one of the indexing attributes for access control.

Part 2. Running user-initiated search query

Next, we describe how the user’s request produces query results (Figure 4).

Search query lifecycle

Figure 4. Search query lifecycle

  1. The user enters a search string in the web UI to retrieve relevant documents.
  2. Based on the active sign-in session, the UI passes the user’s ID token to the search endpoint of the API Gateway.
  3. The API Gateway uses Amazon Cognito integration to authorize the search API request.
  4. Once validated, the search API endpoint request invokes the search document Lambda function.
  5. The search document function sends the search query string as the inference request to the encoder model to receive the embedding as the inference response.
  6. The search document function uses the embedding response to build an OpenSearch k-NN search query. The HNSW algorithm is configured with the Lucene engine and its filter option to maintain the access control logic based on the custom department claim from the user’s ID token. The OpenSearch query returns the following to the query embeddings:
    • Top three Approximate k-NN
    • Other attributes, such as reviewid and reviewBody
  7. The workflow sends the relevant query result attributes back to the UI.

Prerequisites

You must have the following prerequisites for this solution:

Walkthrough

Setup

The following steps deploy two AWS CDK stacks into your AWS account:

  • content-repo-search-stack (blog-content-repo-search-stack.ts) creates the environment detailed in Figure 3, except for the SageMaker endpoint, which you create in a spearate step.
  • demo-data-stack (userpool-demo-data-stack.ts) deploys sample users, groups, and role mappings.

To continue setup, use the following commands:

  1. Clone the project Git repository:
    git clone https://github.com/aws-samples/content-repository-with-multilingual-search content-repository
  2. Install the necessary dependencies:
    cd content-repository/backend-cdk 
    npm install
  3. Configure environment variables:
    export CDK_DEFAULT_ACCOUNT=$(aws sts get-caller-identity --query 'Account' --output text)
    export CDK_DEFAULT_REGION=$(aws configure get region)
  4. Bootstrap your account for AWS CDK usage:
    cdk bootstrap aws://$CDK_DEFAULT_ACCOUNT/$CDK_DEFAULT_REGION
  5. Deploy the code to your AWS account:
    cdk deploy --all

The complete stack set-up may take up to 20 minutes.

Creation of SageMaker endpoint

Follow below steps to create the SageMaker endpoint in the same AWS Region where you deployed the AWS CDK stack.

    1. Sign in to the SageMaker console.
    2. In the navigation menu, select Notebook, then Notebook instances.
    3. Choose Create notebook instance.
    4. Under the Notebook instance settings, enter content-repo-notebook as the notebook instance name, and leave other defaults as-is.
    5. Under the Permissions and encryption section (Figure 5), you need to set the IAM role section to the role with the prefix content-repo-search-stack. In case you don’t see this role automatically populated, select it from the drop-down. Leave the rest of the defaults, and choose Create notebook instance.

      Notebook permissions

      Figure 5. Notebook permissions

    6. The notebook creation status changes to Pending before it’s available for use within 3-4 minutes.
    7. Once the notebook is in the Available status, choose Open Jupyter.
    8. Choose the Upload button and upload the create-sagemaker-endpoint.ipynb file in the backend-cdk folder of the root of the blog repository.
    9. Open the create-sagemaker-endpoint.ipynb notebook. Select the option Run All from the Cell menu (Figure 6). This might take up to 10 minutes.

      Run create-sagemaker-endpoint notebook cells

      Figure 6. Run create-sagemaker-endpoint notebook cells

    10. After all the cells have successfully run, verify that the AWS Systems Manager parameter sagemaker-endpoint is updated with the value of the SageMaker endpoint name. An example of value as the output of the cell is in Figure 7. In case you don’t see the output, check if the preceding steps were run correctly.

      SSM parameter updated with SageMaker endpoint

      Figure 7. SSM parameter updated with SageMaker endpoint

    11. Verify in the SageMaker console that the inference endpoint with the prefix tensorflow-inference has been deployed and is set to status InService.
    12. Upload sample data to the content repository:
      • Update the S3_BUCKET_NAME variable in the upload_documents_to_S3.sh script in the root folder of the blog repository with the s3SourceBucketName from the AWS CDK output of the content-repo-search-stack.
      • Run upload_documents_to_S3.sh script to upload 150 sample documents to the content repository. This takes 5-6 minutes. During this process, the uploaded document triggers the workflow described in the Implementing multilingual semantic search functionality.

Using the search service

At this stage, you have deployed all the building blocks for the content repository in your AWS account. Next, as part of the upload sample data to the content repository, you pushed a limited corpus of 150 sample documents (.png format). Each document is in one of the four different languages – English, German, Spanish and French. With the added multilingual search capability, you can query in one language and receive semantically similar results across different languages while maintaining the access control logic.

  1. Access the frontend application:
    • Copy the amplifyHostedAppUrl value of the AWS CDK output from the content-repo-search-stack shown in the terminal.
    • Enter the URL in your web browser to access the frontend application.
    • A temporary page displays until the automated build and deployment of the React application completes after 4-5 minutes.
  2. Sign into the application:
    • The content repository provides two demo users with credentials as part of the demo-data-stack in the AWS CDK output. Copy the password from the terminal associated with the sales-user, which belongs to the sales department.
    • Follow the prompts from the React webpage to sign in with the sales-user and change the temporary password.
  3. Enter search queries and verify results. The search action invokes the workflow described in Running input search query. For example:
    • Enter works well as the search query. Note the multilingual output and the semantically similar results (Figure 8).

      Positive sentiment multi-lingual search result for the sales-user

        Figure 8. Positive sentiment multilingual search result for the sales-user

    • Enter bad quality as the search query. Note the multilingual output and the semantically similar results (Figure 9).

      Negative sentiment multi-lingual search result for the sales-user

      Figure 9. Negative sentiment multi-lingual search result for the sales-user

  4. Sign out as the sales-user with the Log Out button on the webpage.
  5. Sign in using the marketing-user credentials to verify access control:
    • Follow the sign in procedure in step 2 but with the marketing-user.
    • This time with works well as search query, you find different output. This is because the access control only allows marketing-user to search for the documents that belong to the marketing department (Figure 10).

      Positive sentiment multi-lingual search result for the marketing-user

      Figure 10. Positive sentiment multilingual search result for the marketing-user

Cleanup

In the backend-cdk subdirectory of the cloned repository, delete the deployed resources: cdk destroy --all.

Additionally, you need to access the Amazon SageMaker console to delete the SageMaker endpoint and notebook instance created as part of the Walkthrough setup section.

Conclusion

In this blog, we enriched the content repository with multi-lingual semantic search features while maintaining the access control fundamentals that we implemented in Part 1. The building blocks of the semantic search for unstructured documents—Amazon Textract, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon OpenSearch Service—set a foundation for you to customize and enhance the search capabilities for your specific use case. For example, you can leverage the fast developments in Large Language Models (LLM) to enhance the semantic search experience. You can replace the encoder model with an LLM capable of generating multilingual embeddings while still maintaining the OpenSearch service to store and index data and perform vector search.

AWS Week in Review – AWS Glue Crawlers Now Supports Apache Iceberg, Amazon RDS Updates, and More – July 10, 2023

Post Syndicated from Antje Barth original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-aws-glue-crawlers-now-supports-apache-iceberg-amazon-rds-updates-and-more-july-10-2023/

The US celebrated Independence Day last week on July 4 with fireworks and barbecues across the country. But fireworks weren’t the only thing that launched last week. Let’s have a look!

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some launches that got my attention:

AWS GlueAWS Glue Crawlers now supports Apache Iceberg tables. Apache Iceberg is an open-source table format for data stored in data lakes. You can now automatically register Apache Iceberg tables into AWS Glue Data Catalog by running the Glue Crawler. You can then query Glue Catalog Iceberg tables across various analytics engines and apply AWS Lake Formation fine-grained permissions when querying from Amazon Athena. Check out the AWS Glue Crawler documentation to learn more.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL – PostgreSQL 16 Beta 2 is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment. The PostgreSQL community released PostgreSQL 16 Beta 2 on June 29, 2023, which enables logical replication from standbys and includes numerous performance improvements. You can deploy PostgreSQL 16 Beta 2 in the preview environment and start evaluating the pre-release of PostgreSQL 16 on Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL.

In addition, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Multi-AZ Deployments with two readable standbys now supports logical replication. With logical replication, you can stream data changes from Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to other databases for use cases such as data consolidation for analytical applications, change data capture (CDC), replicating select tables rather than the entire database, or for replicating data between different major versions of PostgreSQL. Check out the Amazon RDS User Guide for more details.

Amazon CloudWatch – Amazon CloudWatch now supports Service Quotas in cross-account observability. With this, you can track and visualize resource utilization and limits across various AWS services from multiple AWS accounts within a region using a central monitoring account. You no longer have to track the quotas by logging in to individual accounts, instead from a central monitoring account, you can create dashboards and alarms for the AWS service quota usage across all your source accounts from a central monitoring account. Setup CloudWatch cross-account observability to get started.

Amazon SageMaker – You can now associate a SageMaker Model Card with a specific model version in SageMaker Model Registry. This lets you establish a single source of truth for your registered model versions, with comprehensive, centralized, and standardized documentation across all stages of the model’s journey on SageMaker, facilitating discoverability and promoting governance, compliance, and accountability throughout the model lifecycle. Learn more about SageMaker Model Cards in the developer guide.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS News
Here are some additional blog posts and news items that you might find interesting:

Building generative AI applications for your startup – In this AWS Startups Blog post, Hrushikesh explains various approaches to build generative AI applications, and reviews their key component. Read the full post for the details.

Components of the generative AI landscape

Components of the generative AI landscape.

How Alexa learned to speak with an Irish accent – If you’re curious how Amazon researchers used voice conversation to generate Irish-accented training data in Alexa’s own voice, check out this Amazon Science Blog post. 

AWS open-source news and updates – My colleague Ricardo writes this weekly open-source newsletter in which he highlights new open-source projects, tools, and demos from the AWS Community.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

AWS Global Summits – Check your calendars and sign up for the AWS Summit close to where you live or work: Hong Kong (July 20), New York City (July 26), Taiwan (August 2-3), São Paulo (August 3), and Mexico City (August 30).

AWS Community Days – Join a community-led conference run by AWS user group leaders in your region: Malaysia (July 22), Philippines (July 29-30), Colombia (August 12), and West Africa (August 19).

AWS re:Invent 2023AWS re:Invent (November 27 – December 1) – Join us to hear the latest from AWS, learn from experts, and connect with the global cloud community. Registration is now open.

You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Week in Review!

— Antje

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

Designing a hybrid AI/ML data access strategy with Amazon SageMaker

Post Syndicated from Franklin Aguinaldo original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/designing-a-hybrid-ai-ml-data-access-strategy-with-amazon-sagemaker/

Over time, many enterprises have built an on-premises cluster of servers, accumulating data, and then procuring more servers and storage. They often begin their ML journey by experimenting locally on their laptops. Investment in artificial intelligence (AI) is at a different stage in every business organization. Some remain completely on-premises, others are hybrid (both on-premises and cloud), and the remaining have moved completely into the cloud for their AI and machine learning (ML) workloads.

These enterprises are also researching or have started using the cloud to augment their on-premises systems for several reasons. As technology improves, both the size and quantity of data increases over time. The amount of data captured and the number of datapoints continues to expand, which presents a challenge to manage on-premises. Many enterprises are distributed, with offices in different geographic regions, continents, and time zones. While it is possible to increase the on-premises footprint and network pipes, there are still hidden costs to consider for maintenance and upkeep. These organizations are looking to the cloud to shift some of that effort and enable them to burst and use the rich AI and ML features on the cloud.

Defining a hybrid data access strategy

Moving ML workloads into the cloud calls for a robust hybrid data strategy describing how and when you will connect your on-premises data stores to the cloud. For most, it makes sense to make the cloud the source of truth, while still permitting your teams to use and curate datasets on-premises. Defining the cloud as source of truth for your datasets means the primary copy will be in the cloud and any dataset generated will be stored in the same location in the cloud. This ensures that requests for data is served from the primary copy and any derived copies.

A hybrid data access strategy should address the following:

Understand your current and future storage footprint for ML on-premises. Create a map of your ML workloads, along with performance and access requirements for testing and training.
Define connectivity across on-premises locations and the cloud. This includes east-west and north-south traffic to support interconnectivity between sites, required bandwidth, and throughput for the data movement workload requirements.
Define your single source of truth (SSOT)[1] and where the ML datasets will primarily live. Consider how dated, new, hot, and cold data will be stored.
Define your storage performance requirements, mapping them to the appropriate cloud storage services. This will give you the ability to take advantage of cloud-native ML with Amazon SageMaker.

Hybrid data access strategy architecture

To help address these challenges, we worked on outlining an end-to-end system architecture in Figure 1 that defines: 1) connectivity between on-premises data centers and AWS Regions; 2) mappings for on-premises data to the cloud; and 3) Aligning Amazon SageMaker to appropriate storage, based on ML requirements.

AI/ML hybrid data access strategy reference architecture

Figure 1. AI/ML hybrid data access strategy reference architecture

Let’s explore this architecture step by step.

  1. On-premises connectivity to the AWS Cloud runs through AWS Direct Connect for high transfer speeds.
  2. AWS DataSync is used for migrating large datasets into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). AWS DataSync agent is installed on-premises.
  3. On-premises network file system (NFS) or server message block (SMB) data is bridged to the cloud through Amazon S3 File Gateway, using either a virtual machine (VM) or hardware appliance.
  4. AWS Storage Gateway uploads data into Amazon S3 and caches it on-premises.
  5. Amazon S3 is the source of truth for ML assets stored on the cloud.
  6. Download S3 data for experimentation to Amazon SageMaker Studio.
  7. Amazon SageMaker notebooks instances can access data through S3, Amazon FSx for Lustre, and Amazon Elastic File System. Use Amazon File Cache for high-speed caching for access to on-premises data, and Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP for cloud bursting.
  8. SageMaker training jobs can use data in Amazon S3, EFS, and FSx for Lustre. S3 data is accessed via File, Fast File, or Pipe mode, and pre-loaded or lazy-loaded when using FSx for Lustre as training job input. Any existing data on EFS can also be made available to training jobs as well.
  9. Leverage Amazon S3 Glacier for archiving data and reducing storage costs.

ML workloads using Amazon SageMaker

Let’s go deeper into how SageMaker can help you with your ML workloads.

To start mapping ML workloads to the cloud, consider which AWS storage services work with Amazon SageMaker. Amazon S3 typically serves as the central storage location for both structured and unstructured data that is used for ML. This includes raw data coming from upstream applications, and also curated datasets that are organized and stored as part of a Feature Store.

In the initial phases of development, a SageMaker Studio user will leverage S3 APIs to download data from S3 to their private home directory. This home directory is backed by a SageMaker-managed EFS file system. Studio users then point their notebook code (also stored in the home directory) to the local dataset and begin their development tasks.

To scale up and automate model training, SageMaker users can launch training jobs that run outside of the SageMaker Studio notebook environment. There are several options for making data available to a SageMaker training job.

  1. Amazon S3. Users can specify the S3 location of the training dataset. When using S3 as a data source, there are three input modes to choose from:
    • File mode. This is the default input mode, where SageMaker copies the data from S3 to the training instance storage. This storage is either a SageMaker-provisioned Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume or an NVMe SSD that is included with specific instance types. Training only starts after the dataset has been downloaded to the storage, and there must be enough storage space to fit the entire dataset.
    • Fast file mode. Fast file mode exposes S3 objects as a POSIX file system on the training instance. Dataset files are streamed from S3 on demand, as the training script reads them. This means that training can start sooner and require less disk space. Fast file mode also does not require changes to the training code.
    • Pipe mode. Pipe input also streams data in S3 as the training script reads it, but requires code changes. Pipe input mode is largely replaced by the newer and easier-to-use Fast File mode.
  2. FSx for Lustre. Users can specify a FSx for Lustre file system, which SageMaker will mount to the training instance and run the training code. When the FSx for Lustre file system is linked to a S3 bucket, the data can be lazily loaded from S3 during the first training job. Subsequent training jobs on the same dataset can then access it with low latency. Users can also choose to pre-load the file system with S3 data using hsm_restore commands.
  3. Amazon EFS. Users can specify an EFS file system that already contains their training data. SageMaker will mount the file system on the training instance and run the training code.
    Find out how to Choose the best data source for your SageMaker training job.

Conclusion

With this reference architecture, you can develop and deliver ML workloads that run either on-premises or in the cloud. Your enterprise can continue using its on-premises storage and compute for particular ML workloads, while also taking advantage of the cloud, using Amazon SageMaker. The scale available on the cloud allows your enterprise to conduct experiments without worrying about capacity. Start defining your hybrid data strategy on AWS today!

Additional resources:

[1] The practice of aggregating data from many sources to a single source or location.

Harmonize data using AWS Glue and AWS Lake Formation FindMatches ML to build a customer 360 view

Post Syndicated from Nishchai JM original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/harmonize-data-using-aws-glue-and-aws-lake-formation-findmatches-ml-to-build-a-customer-360-view/

In today’s digital world, data is generated by a large number of disparate sources and growing at an exponential rate. Companies are faced with the daunting task of ingesting all this data, cleansing it, and using it to provide outstanding customer experience.

Typically, companies ingest data from multiple sources into their data lake to derive valuable insights from the data. These sources are often related but use different naming conventions, which will prolong cleansing, slowing down the data processing and analytics cycle. This problem particularly impacts companies trying to build accurate, unified customer 360 profiles. There are customer records in this data that are semantic duplicates, that is, they represent the same user entity, but have different labels or values. It’s commonly referred to as a data harmonization or deduplication problem. The underlying schemas were implemented independently and don’t adhere to common keys that can be used for joins to deduplicate records using deterministic techniques. This has led to so-called fuzzy deduplication techniques to address the problem. These techniques utilize various machine learning (ML) based approaches.

In this post, we look at how we can use AWS Glue and the AWS Lake Formation ML transform FindMatches to harmonize (deduplicate) customer data coming from different sources to get a complete customer profile to be able to provide better customer experience. We use Amazon Neptune to visualize the customer data before and after the merge and harmonization.

Overview of solution

In this post, we go through the various steps to apply ML-based fuzzy matching to harmonize customer data across two different datasets for auto and property insurance. These datasets are synthetically generated and represent a common problem for entity records stored in multiple, disparate data sources with their own lineage that appear similar and semantically represent the same entity but don’t have matching keys (or keys that work consistently) for deterministic, rule-based matching. The following diagram shows our solution architecture.

We use an AWS Glue job to transform the auto insurance and property insurance customer source data to create a merged dataset containing fields that are common to both datasets (identifiers) that a human expert (data steward) would use to determine semantic matches. The merged dataset is then used to deduplicate customer records using an AWS Glue ML transform to create a harmonized dataset. We use Neptune to visualize the customer data before and after the merge and harmonization to see how the transform FindMacthes can bring all related customer data together to get a complete customer 360 view.

To demonstrate the solution, we use two separate data sources: one for property insurance customers and another for auto insurance customers, as illustrated in the following diagram.

The data is stored in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket, labeled as Raw Property and Auto Insurance data in the following architecture diagram. The diagram also describes detailed steps to process the raw insurance data into harmonized insurance data to avoid duplicates and build logical relations with related property and auto insurance data for the same customer.

The workflow includes the following steps:

  1. Catalog the raw property and auto insurance data, using an AWS Glue crawler, as tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog.
  2. Transform raw insurance data into CSV format acceptable to Neptune Bulk Loader, using an AWS Glue extract, transform, and load (ETL) job.
  3. When the data is in CSV format, use an Amazon SageMaker Jupyter notebook to run a PySpark script to load the raw data into Neptune and visualize it in a Jupyter notebook.
  4. Run an AWS Glue ETL job to merge the raw property and auto insurance data into one dataset and catalog the merged dataset. This dataset will have duplicates and no relations are built between the auto and property insurance data.
  5. Create and train an AWS Glue ML transform to harmonize the merged data to remove duplicates and build relations between the related data.
  6. Run the AWS Glue ML transform job. The job also catalogs the harmonized data in the Data Catalog and transforms the harmonized insurance data into CSV format acceptable to Neptune Bulk Loader.
  7. When the data is in CSV format, use a Jupyter notebook to run a PySpark script to load the harmonized data into Neptune and visualize it in a Jupyter notebook.

Prerequisites

To follow along with this walkthrough, you must have an AWS account. Your account should have permission to provision and run an AWS CloudFormation script to deploy the AWS services mentioned in the architecture diagram of the solution.

Provision required resources using AWS CloudFormation:

To launch the CloudFormation stack that configures the required resources for this solution in your AWS account, complete the following steps:

  1. Log in to your AWS account and choose Launch Stack:

  1. Follow the prompts on the AWS CloudFormation console to create the stack.
  2. When the launch is complete, navigate to the Outputs tab of the launched stack and note all the key-value pairs of the resources provisioned by the stack.

Verify the raw data and script files S3 bucket

On the CloudFormation stack’s Outputs tab, choose the value for S3BucketName. The S3 bucket name should be cloud360-s3bucketstack-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and should contain folders similar to the following screenshot.

The following are some important folders:

  • auto_property_inputs – Contains raw auto and property data
  • merged_auto_property – Contains the merged data for auto and property insurance
  • output – Contains the delimited files (separate subdirectories)

Catalog the raw data

To help walk through the solution, the CloudFormation stack created and ran an AWS Glue crawler to catalog the property and auto insurance data. To learn more about creating and running AWS Glue crawlers, refer to Working with crawlers on the AWS Glue console. You should see the following tables created by the crawler in the c360_workshop_db AWS Glue database:

  • source_auto_address – Contains address data of customers with auto insurance
  • source_auto_customer – Contains auto insurance details of customers
  • source_auto_vehicles – Contains vehicle details of customers
  • source_property_addresses – Contains address data of customers with property insurance
  • source_property_customers – Contains property insurance details of customers

You can review the data using Amazon Athena. For more information about using Athena to query an AWS Glue table, refer to Running SQL queries using Amazon Athena. For example, you can run the following SQL query:

SELECT * FROM "c360_workshop_db"."source_auto_address" limit 10;

Convert the raw data into CSV files for Neptune

The CloudFormation stack created and ran the AWS Glue ETL job prep_neptune_data to convert the raw data into CSV format acceptable to Neptune Bulk Loader. To learn more about building an AWS Glue ETL job using AWS Glue Studio and to review the job created for this solution, refer to Creating ETL jobs with AWS Glue Studio.

Verify the completion of job run by navigating to the Runs tab and checking the status of most recent run.

Verify the CSV files created by the AWS Glue job in the S3 bucket under the output folder.

Load and visualize the raw data in Neptune

This section uses SageMaker Jupyter notebooks to load, query, explore, and visualize the raw property and auto insurance data in Neptune. Jupyter notebooks are web-based interactive platforms. We use Python scripts to analyze the data in a Jupyter notebook. A Jupyter notebook with the required Python scripts has already been provisioned by the CloudFormation stack.

  1. Start Jupyter Notebook.
  2. Choose the Neptune folder on the Files tab.

  1. Under the Customer360 folder, open the notebook explore_raw_insurance_data.ipynb.

  1. Run Steps 1–5 in the notebook to analyze and visualize the raw insurance data.

The rest of the instructions are inside the notebook itself. The following is a summary of the tasks for each step in the notebook:

  • Step 1: Retrieve Config – Run this cell to run the commands to connect to Neptune for Bulk Loader.
  • Step 2: Load Source Auto Data – Load the auto insurance data into Neptune as vertices and edges.
  • Step 3: Load Source Property Data – Load the property insurance data into Neptune as vertices and edges.
  • Step 4: UI Configuration – This block sets up the UI config and provides UI hints.
  • Step 5: Explore entire graph – The first block builds and displays a graph for all customers with more than four coverages of auto or property insurance policies. The second block displays the graph for four different records for a customer with the name James.

These are all records for the same customer, but because they’re not linked in any way, they appear as different customer records. The AWS Glue FindMatches ML transform job will identify these records as customer James, and the records provide complete visibility on all policies owned by James. The Neptune graph looks like the following example. The vertex covers represents the coverage of auto or property insurance by the owner (James in this case) and the vertex locatedAt represents the address of the property or vehicle that is covered by the owner’s insurance.

Merge the raw data and crawl the merged dataset

The CloudFormation stack created and ran the AWS Glue ETL job merge_auto_property to merge the raw property and auto insurance data into one dataset and catalog the resultant dataset in the Data Catalog. The AWS Glue ETL job does the following transforms on the raw data and merges the transformed data into one dataset:

  • Changes the following fields on the source table source_auto_customer:
    1. Changes policyid to id and data type to string
    2. Changes fname to first_name
    3. Changes lname to last_name
    4. Changes work to company
    5. Changes dob to date_of_birth
    6. Changes phone to home_phone
    7. Drops the fields birthdate, priority, policysince, and createddate
  • Changes the following fields on the source_property_customers:
    1. Changes customer_id to id and data type to string
    2. Changes social to ssn
    3. Drops the fields job, email, industry, city, state, zipcode, netnew, sales_rounded, sales_decimal, priority, and industry2
  • After converting the unique ID field in each table to string type and renaming it to id, the AWS Glue job appends the suffix -auto to all id fields in the source_auto_customer table and the suffix -property to all id fields in the source_propery_customer table before copying all the data from both tables into the merged_auto_property table.

Verify the new table created by the job in the Data Catalog and review the merged dataset using Athena using below Athena SQL query:

SELECT * FROM "c360_workshop_db"."merged_auto_property" limit 10

For more information about how to review the data in the merged_auto_property table, refer to Running SQL queries using Amazon Athena.

Create, teach, and tune the Lake Formation ML transform

The merged AWS Glue job created a Data Catalog called merged_auto_property. Preview the table in Athena Query Editor and download the dataset as a CSV from the Athena console. You can open the CSV file for quick comparison of duplicates.

The rows with IDs 11376-property and 11377-property are mostly same except for the last two digits of their SSN, but these are mostly human errors. The fuzzy matches are easy to spot by a human expert or data steward with domain knowledge of how this data was generated, cleansed, and processed in the various source systems. Although a human expert can identify those duplicates on a small dataset, it becomes tedious when dealing with thousands of records. The AWS Glue ML transform builds on this intuition and provides an easy-to-use ML-based algorithm to automatically apply this approach to large datasets efficiently.

Create the FindMatches ML transform

  1. On the AWS Glue console, expand Data Integration and ETL in the navigation pane.
  2. Under Data classification tools, choose Record Matching.

This will open the ML transforms page.

  1. Choose Create transform.
  2. For Name, enter c360-ml-transform.
  3. For Existing IAM role, choose GlueServiceRoleLab.
  4. For Worker type, choose G.2X (Recommended).
  5. For Number of workers, enter 10.
  6. For Glue version, choose as Spark 2.4 (Glue Version 2.0).
  7. Keep the other values as default and choose Next.

  1. For Database, choose c360_workshop_db.
  2. For Table, choose merged_auto_property.
  3. For Primary key, select id.
  4. Choose Next.

  1. In the Choose tuning options section, you can tune performance and cost metrics available for the ML transform. We stay with the default trade-offs for a balanced approach.

We have specified these values to achieve balanced results. If needed, you can adjust these values later by selecting the transform and using the Tune menu.

  1. Review the values and choose Create ML transform.

The ML transform is now created with the status Needs training.

Teach the transform to identify the duplicates

In this step, we teach the transform by providing labeled examples of matching and non-matching records. You can create your labeling set yourself or allow AWS Glue to generate the labeling set based on heuristics. AWS Glue extracts records from your source data and suggests potential matching records. The file will contain approximately 100 data samples for you to work with.

  1. On the AWS Glue console, navigate to the ML transforms page.
  2. Select the transform c360-ml-transform and choose Train model.

  1. Select I have labels and choose Browse S3 to upload labels from Amazon S3.


Two labeled files have been created for this example. We upload these files to teach the ML transform.

  1. Navigate to the folder label in your S3 bucket, select the labeled file (Label-1-iteration.csv), and choose Choose. And Click “Upload labeling file from S3”.
  2. A green banner appears for successful uploads.
  3. Upload another label file (Label-2-iteration.csv) and select Append to my existing labels.
  4. Wait for the successful upload, then choose Next.

  1. Review the details in the Estimate quality metrics section and choose Close.

Verify that the ML transform status is Ready for use. Note that the label count is 200 because we successfully uploaded two labeled files to teach the transform. Now we can use it in an AWS Glue ETL job for fuzzy matching of the full dataset.

Before proceeding to the next steps, note the transform ID (tfm-xxxxxxx) for the created ML transform.

Harmonize the data, catalog the harmonized data, and convert the data into CSV files for Neptune

In this step, we run an AWS Glue ML transform job to find matches in the merged data. The job also catalogs the harmonized dataset in the Data Catalog and converts the merged [A1] dataset into CSV files for Neptune to show the relations in the matched records.

  1. On the AWS Glue console, choose Jobs in the navigation pane.
  2. Choose the job perform_ml_dedup.

  1. On the job details page, expand Additional properties.
  2. Under Job parameters, enter the transform ID you saved earlier and save the settings.

    1. Choose Run and monitor the job status for completion.

  1. Run the following query in Athena to review the data in the new table ml_matched_auto_property, created and cataloged by the AWS Glue job, and observe the results:
SELECT * FROM c360_workshop_db.ml_matched_auto_property WHERE first_name like 'Jam%' and last_name like 'Sanchez%';

The job has added a new column called match_id. If multiple records follow the match criteria, then all matching records have the same match_id.

Match IDs play a crucial role in data harmonization using Lake Formation FindMatches. Each row is assigned a unique integer match ID based on matching criteria such as first_name, last_name, SSN, or date_of_birth, as defined in the uploaded label file. For instance, match ID 25769803941 is assigned to all records that meet the match criteria, such as row 1, 2, 4, and 5 which share the same last_name, SSN, and date_of_birth. Consequently, the properties with ID 19801-property, 29801-auto, 19800-property, and 29800-auto all share the same match ID. It’s important to take note of the match ID because it will be utilized for Neptune Gremlin queries.

The output of the AWS Glue job also has created two files, master_vertex.csv and master_edge.csv, in the S3 bucket output/master_data. We use these files to load data into the Neptune database to find the relationship among different entities.

Load and visualize the harmonized data in Neptune

This section uses Jupyter notebooks to load, query, explore, and visualize the ML matched auto and property insurance data in Neptune. Complete the following steps:

  1. Start Jupyter Notebook.
  2. Choose the Neptune folder on the Files tab.
  3. Under the Customer360 folder, choose the notebook. explore_harmonized_insurance_data.ipynb.
  4. Run Steps 1–5 in the notebook to analyze and visualize the raw insurance data.

The rest of the instructions are inside the notebook itself. The following is a summary of the tasks for each step in the notebook:

  • Step 1. Retrieve Config – Run this cell to run the commands to connect to Neptune for Bulk Loader.
  • Step 2. Load Harmonized Customer Data – Load the final vertex and edge files into Neptune.
  • Step 3. Initialize Neptune node traversals – This block sets up the UI config and provides UI hints.
  • Step 4. Exploring Customer 360 graph – Replace the Match_id 25769803941 copied from the previous step into g.V('REPLACE_ME')( If its not replaced already ) and run the cell.

This displays the graph for four different records for a customer with first_name, and James and JamE are is now connected with the SameAs vertex. The Neptune graph helps connect different entities with match criteria; the AWS Glue FindMatches ML transform job has identified these records as customer James and the records show the Match_id is the same for them. The following diagram shows an example of the Neptune graph. The vertex covers represents the coverage of auto or property insurance by the owner (James in this case) and the vertex locatedAt represents the address of the property or vehicle that is covered by the owner’s insurance.

Clean up

To avoid incurring additional charges to your account, on the AWS CloudFormation console, select the stack that you provisioned as part of this post and delete it.

Conclusion

In this post, we showed how to use the AWS Lake Formation FindMatch transform for fuzzy matching data on a data lake to link records if there are no join keys and group records with similar match IDs. You can use Amazon Neptune to establish the relationship between records and visualize the connect graph for deriving insights.

We encourage you to explore our range of services and see how they can help you achieve your goals. For more data and analytics blog posts, check out AWS Blogs.


About the Authors

Nishchai JM is an Analytics Specialist Solutions Architect at Amazon Web services. He specializes in building Big-data applications and help customer to modernize their applications on Cloud. He thinks Data is new oil and spends most of his time in deriving insights out of the Data.

Varad Ram is Senior Solutions Architect in Amazon Web Services. He likes to help customers adopt to cloud technologies and is particularly interested in artificial intelligence. He believes deep learning will power future technology growth. In his spare time, he like to be outdoor with his daughter and son.

Narendra Gupta is a Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS, helping customers on their cloud journey with a focus on AWS analytics services. Outside of work, Narendra enjoys learning new technologies, watching movies, and visiting new places

Arun A K is a Big Data Solutions Architect with AWS. He works with customers to provide architectural guidance for running analytics solutions on the cloud. In his free time, Arun loves to enjoy quality time with his family

Amazon OpenSearch Service’s vector database capabilities explained

Post Syndicated from Jon Handler original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/amazon-opensearch-services-vector-database-capabilities-explained/

OpenSearch is a scalable, flexible, and extensible open-source software suite for search, analytics, security monitoring, and observability applications, licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. It comprises a search engine, OpenSearch, which delivers low-latency search and aggregations, OpenSearch Dashboards, a visualization and dashboarding tool, and a suite of plugins that provide advanced capabilities like alerting, fine-grained access control, observability, security monitoring, and vector storage and processing. Amazon OpenSearch Service is a fully managed service that makes it simple to deploy, scale, and operate OpenSearch in the AWS Cloud.

As an end-user, when you use OpenSearch’s search capabilities, you generally have a goal in mind—something you want to accomplish. Along the way, you use OpenSearch to gather information in support of achieving that goal (or maybe the information is the original goal). We’ve all become used to the “search box” interface, where you type some words, and the search engine brings back results based on word-to-word matching. Let’s say you want to buy a couch in order to spend cozy evenings with your family around the fire. You go to Amazon.com, and you type “a cozy place to sit by the fire.” Unfortunately, if you run that search on Amazon.com, you get items like fire pits, heating fans, and home decorations—not what you intended. The problem is that couch manufacturers probably didn’t use the words “cozy,” “place,” “sit,” and “fire” in their product titles or descriptions.

In recent years, machine learning (ML) techniques have become increasingly popular to enhance search. Among them are the use of embedding models, a type of model that can encode a large body of data into an n-dimensional space where each entity is encoded into a vector, a data point in that space, and organized such that similar entities are closer together. An embedding model, for instance, could encode the semantics of a corpus. By searching for the vectors nearest to an encoded document — k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) search — you can find the most semantically similar documents. Sophisticated embedding models can support multiple modalities, for instance, encoding the image and text of a product catalog and enabling similarity matching on both modalities.

A vector database provides efficient vector similarity search by providing specialized indexes like k-NN indexes. It also provides other database functionality like managing vector data alongside other data types, workload management, access control and more. OpenSearch’s k-NN plugin provides core vector database functionality for OpenSearch, so when your customer searches for “a cozy place to sit by the fire” in your catalog, you can encode that prompt and use OpenSearch to perform a nearest neighbor query to surface that 8-foot, blue couch with designer arranged photographs in front of fireplaces.

Using OpenSearch Service as a vector database

With OpenSearch Service’s vector database capabilities, you can implement semantic search, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) with LLMs, recommendation engines, and search rich media.

Semantic search

With semantic search, you improve the relevance of retrieved results using language-based embeddings on search documents. You enable your search customers to use natural language queries, like “a cozy place to sit by the fire” to find their 8-foot-long blue couch. For more information, refer to Building a semantic search engine in OpenSearch to learn how semantic search can deliver a 15% relevance improvement, as measured by normalized discounted cumulative gain (nDCG) metrics compared with keyword search. For a concrete example, our Improve search relevance with ML in Amazon OpenSearch Service workshop explores the difference between keyword and semantic search, based on a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model, hosted by Amazon SageMaker to generate vectors and store them in OpenSearch. The workshop uses product question answers as an example to show how keyword search using the keywords/phrases of the query leads to some irrelevant results. Semantic search is able to retrieve more relevant documents by matching the context and semantics of the query. The following diagram shows an example architecture for a semantic search application with OpenSearch Service as the vector database.

Architecture diagram showing how to use Amazon OpenSearch Service to perform semantic search to improve relevance

Retrieval Augmented Generation with LLMs

RAG is a method for building trustworthy generative AI chatbots using generative LLMs like OpenAI, ChatGPT, or Amazon Titan Text. With the rise of generative LLMs, application developers are looking for ways to take advantage of this innovative technology. One popular use case involves delivering conversational experiences through intelligent agents. Perhaps you’re a software provider with knowledge bases for product information, customer self-service, or industry domain knowledge like tax reporting rules or medical information about diseases and treatments. A conversational search experience provides an intuitive interface for users to sift through information through dialog and Q&A. Generative LLMs on their own are prone to hallucinations—a situation where the model generates a believable but factually incorrect response. RAG solves this problem by complementing generative LLMs with an external knowledge base that is typically built using a vector database hydrated with vector-encoded knowledge articles.

As illustrated in the following diagram, the query workflow starts with a question that is encoded and used to retrieve relevant knowledge articles from the vector database. Those results are sent to the generative LLM whose job is to augment those results, typically by summarizing the results as a conversational response. By complementing the generative model with a knowledge base, RAG grounds the model on facts to minimize hallucinations. You can learn more about building a RAG solution in the Retrieval Augmented Generation module of our semantic search workshop.

Architecture diagram showing how to use Amazon OpenSearch Service to perform retrieval-augmented generation

Recommendation engine

Recommendations are a common component in the search experience, especially for ecommerce applications. Adding a user experience feature like “more like this” or “customers who bought this also bought that” can drive additional revenue through getting customers what they want. Search architects employ many techniques and technologies to build recommendations, including Deep Neural Network (DNN) based recommendation algorithms such as the two-tower neural net model, YoutubeDNN. A trained embedding model encodes products, for example, into an embedding space where products that are frequently bought together are considered more similar, and therefore are represented as data points that are closer together in the embedding space. Another possibility
is that product embeddings are based on co-rating similarity instead of purchase activity. You can employ this affinity data through calculating the vector similarity between a particular user’s embedding and vectors in the database to return recommended items. The following diagram shows an example architecture of building a recommendation engine with OpenSearch as a vector store.

Architecture diagram showing how to use Amazon OpenSearch Service as a recommendation engine

Media search

Media search enables users to query the search engine with rich media like images, audio, and video. Its implementation is similar to semantic search—you create vector embeddings for your search documents and then query OpenSearch Service with a vector. The difference is you use a computer vision deep neural network (e.g. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)) such as ResNet to convert images into vectors. The following diagram shows an example architecture of building an image search with OpenSearch as the vector store.

Architecture diagram showing how to use Amazon OpenSearch Service to search rich media like images, videos, and audio files

Understanding the technology

OpenSearch uses approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) algorithms from the NMSLIB, FAISS, and Lucene libraries to power k-NN search. These search methods employ ANN to improve search latency for large datasets. Of the three search methods the k-NN plugin provides, this method offers the best search scalability for large datasets. The engine details are as follows:

  • Non-Metric Space Library (NMSLIB) – NMSLIB implements the HNSW ANN algorithm
  • Facebook AI Similarity Search (FAISS) – FAISS implements both HNSW and IVF ANN algorithms
  • Lucene – Lucene implements the HNSW algorithm

Each of the three engines used for approximate k-NN search has its own attributes that make one more sensible to use than the others in a given situation. You can follow the general information in this section to help determine which engine will best meet your requirements.

In general, NMSLIB and FAISS should be selected for large-scale use cases. Lucene is a good option for smaller deployments, but offers benefits like smart filtering where the optimal filtering strategy—pre-filtering, post-filtering, or exact k-NN—is automatically applied depending on the situation. The following table summarizes the differences between each option.

.

NMSLIB-HNSW

FAISS-HNSW

FAISS-IVF

Lucene-HNSW

Max Dimension

16,000

16,000

16,000

1024

Filter

Post filter

Post filter

Post filter

Filter while search

Training Required

No

No

Yes

No

Similarity Metrics

l2, innerproduct, cosinesimil, l1, linf

l2, innerproduct

l2, innerproduct

l2, cosinesimil

Vector Volume

Tens of billions

Tens of billions

Tens of billions

< Ten million

Indexing latency

Low

Low

Lowest

Low

Query Latency & Quality

Low latency & high quality

Low latency & high quality

Low latency & low quality

High latency & high quality

Vector Compression

Flat

Flat

Product Quantization

Flat

Product Quantization

Flat

Memory Consumption

High

High

Low with PQ

Medium

Low with PQ

High

Approximate and exact nearest-neighbor search

The OpenSearch Service k-NN plugin supports three different methods for obtaining the k-nearest neighbors from an index of vectors: approximate k-NN, score script (exact k-NN), and painless extensions (exact k-NN).

Approximate k-NN

The first method takes an approximate nearest neighbor approach—it uses one of several algorithms to return the approximate k-nearest neighbors to a query vector. Usually, these algorithms sacrifice indexing speed and search accuracy in return for performance benefits such as lower latency, smaller memory footprints, and more scalable search. Approximate k-NN is the best choice for searches over large indexes (that is, hundreds of thousands of vectors or more) that require low latency. You should not use approximate k-NN if you want to apply a filter on the index before the k-NN search, which greatly reduces the number of vectors to be searched. In this case, you should use either the score script method or painless extensions.

Score script

The second method extends the OpenSearch Service score script functionality to run a brute force, exact k-NN search over knn_vector fields or fields that can represent binary objects. With this approach, you can run k-NN search on a subset of vectors in your index (sometimes referred to as a pre-filter search). This approach is preferred for searches over smaller bodies of documents or when a pre-filter is needed. Using this approach on large indexes may lead to high latencies.

Painless extensions

The third method adds the distance functions as painless extensions that you can use in more complex combinations. Similar to the k-NN score script, you can use this method to perform a brute force, exact k-NN search across an index, which also supports pre-filtering. This approach has slightly slower query performance compared to the k-NN score script. If your use case requires more customization over the final score, you should use this approach over score script k-NN.

Vector search algorithms

The simple way to find similar vectors is to use k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) algorithms, which compute the distance between a query vector and the other vectors in the vector database. As we mentioned earlier, the score script k-NN and painless extensions search methods use the exact k-NN algorithms under the hood. However, in the case of extremely large datasets with high dimensionality, this creates a scaling problem that reduces the efficiency of the search. Approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search methods can overcome this by employing tools that restructure indexes more efficiently and reduce the dimensionality of searchable vectors. There are different ANN search algorithms; for example, locality sensitive hashing, tree-based, cluster-based, and graph-based. OpenSearch implements two ANN algorithms: Hierarchical Navigable Small Worlds (HNSW) and Inverted File System (IVF). For a more detailed explanation of how the HNSW and IVF algorithms work in OpenSearch, see blog post “Choose the k-NN algorithm for your billion-scale use case with OpenSearch”.

Hierarchical Navigable Small Worlds

The HNSW algorithm is one of the most popular algorithms out there for ANN search. The core idea of the algorithm is to build a graph with edges connecting index vectors that are close to each other. Then, on search, this graph is partially traversed to find the approximate nearest neighbors to the query vector. To steer the traversal towards the query’s nearest neighbors, the algorithm always visits the closest candidate to the query vector next.

Inverted File

The IVF algorithm separates your index vectors into a set of buckets, then, to reduce your search time, only searches through a subset of these buckets. However, if the algorithm just randomly split up your vectors into different buckets, and only searched a subset of them, it would yield a poor approximation. The IVF algorithm uses a more elegant approach. First, before indexing begins, it assigns each bucket a representative vector. When a vector is indexed, it gets added to the bucket that has the closest representative vector. This way, vectors that are closer to each other are placed roughly in the same or nearby buckets.

Vector similarity metrics

All search engines use a similarity metric to rank and sort results and bring the most relevant results to the top. When you use a plain text query, the similarity metric is called TF-IDF, which measures the importance of the terms in the query and generates a score based on the number of textual matches. When your query includes a vector, the similarity metrics are spatial in nature, taking advantage of proximity in the vector space. OpenSearch supports several similarity or distance measures:

  • Euclidean distance – The straight-line distance between points.
  • L1 (Manhattan) distance – The sum of the differences of all of the vector components. L1 distance measures how many orthogonal city blocks you need to traverse from point A to point B.
  • L-infinity (chessboard) distance – The number of moves a King would make on an n-dimensional chessboard. It’s different than Euclidean distance on the diagonals—a diagonal step on a 2-dimensional chessboard is 1.41 Euclidean units away, but 2 L-infinity units away.
  • Inner product – The product of the magnitudes of two vectors and the cosine of the angle between them. Usually used for natural language processing (NLP) vector similarity.
  • Cosine similarity – The cosine of the angle between two vectors in a vector space.
  • Hamming distance – For binary-coded vectors, the number of bits that differ between the two vectors.

Advantage of OpenSearch as a vector database

When you use OpenSearch Service as a vector database, you can take advantage of the service’s features like usability, scalability, availability, interoperability, and security. More importantly, you can use OpenSearch’s search features to enhance the search experience. For example, you can use Learning to Rank in OpenSearch to integrate user clickthrough behavior data into your search application and improve search relevance. You can also combine OpenSearch text search and vector search capabilities to search documents with keyword and semantic similarity. You can also use other fields in the index to filter documents to improve relevance. For advanced users, you can use a hybrid scoring model to combine OpenSearch’s text-based relevance score, computed with the Okapi BM25 function and its vector search score to improve the ranking of your search results.

Scale and limits

OpenSearch as vector database support billions of vector records. Keep in mind the following calculator regarding number of vectors and dimensions to size your cluster.

Number of vectors

OpenSearch VectorDB takes advantage of the sharding capabilities of OpenSearch and can scale to billions of vectors at single-digit millisecond latencies by sharding vectors and scale horizontally by adding more nodes. The number of vectors that can fit in a single machine is a function of the off-heap memory availability on the machine. The number of nodes required will depend on the amount of memory that can be used for the algorithm per node and the total amount of memory required by the algorithm. The more nodes, the more memory and better performance. The amount of memory available per node is computed as memory_available = (node_memoryjvm_size) * circuit_breaker_limit, with the following parameters:

  • node_memory – The total memory of the instance.
  • jvm_size – The OpenSearch JVM heap size. This is set to half of the instance’s RAM, capped at approximately 32 GB.
  • circuit_breaker_limit – The native memory usage threshold for the circuit breaker. This is set to 0.5.

Total cluster memory estimation depends on total number of vector records and algorithms. HNSW and IVF have different memory requirements. You can refer to Memory Estimation for more details.

Number of dimensions

OpenSearch’s current dimension limit for the vector field knn_vector is 16,000 dimensions. Each dimension is represented as a 32-bit float. The more dimensions, the more memory you’ll need to index and search. The number of dimensions is usually determined by the embedding models that translate the entity to a vector. There are a lot of options to choose from when building your knn_vector field. To determine the correct methods and parameters to choose, refer to Choosing the right method.

Customer stories:

Amazon Music

Amazon Music is always innovating to provide customers with unique and personalized experiences. One of Amazon Music’s approaches to music recommendations is a remix of a classic Amazon innovation, item-to-item collaborative filtering, and vector databases. Using data aggregated based on user listening behavior, Amazon Music has created an embedding model that encodes music tracks and customer representations into a vector space where neighboring vectors represent tracks that are similar. 100 million songs are encoded into vectors, indexed into OpenSearch, and served across multiple geographies to power real-time recommendations. OpenSearch currently manages 1.05 billion vectors and supports a peak load of 7,100 vector queries per second to power Amazon Music recommendations.

The item-to-item collaborative filter continues to be among the most popular methods for online product recommendations because of its effectiveness at scaling to large customer bases and product catalogs. OpenSearch makes it easier to operationalize and further the scalability of the recommender by providing scale-out infrastructure and k-NN indexes that grow linearly with respect to the number of tracks and similarity search in logarithmic time.

The following figure visualizes the high-dimensional space created by the vector embedding.

A visualization of the vector encoding of Amazon Music entries in the large vector space

Brand protection at Amazon

Amazon strives to deliver the world’s most trustworthy shopping experience, offering customers the widest possible selection of authentic products. To earn and maintain our customers’ trust, we strictly prohibit the sale of counterfeit products, and we continue to invest in innovations that ensure only authentic products reach our customers. Amazon’s brand protection programs build trust with brands by accurately representing and completely protecting their brand. We strive to ensure that public perception mirrors the trustworthy experience we deliver. Our brand protection strategy focuses on four pillars: (1) Proactive Controls (2) Powerful Tools to Protect Brands (3) Holding Bad Actors Accountable (4) Protecting and Educating Customers. Amazon OpenSearch Service is a key part of Amazon’s Proactive Controls.

In 2022, Amazon’s automated technology scanned more than 8 billion attempted changes daily to product detail pages for signs of potential abuse. Our proactive controls found more than 99% of blocked or removed listings before a brand ever had to find and report it. These listings were suspected of being fraudulent, infringing, counterfeit, or at risk of other forms of abuse. To perform these scans, Amazon created tooling that uses advanced and innovative techniques, including the use of advanced machine learning models to automate the detection of intellectual property infringements in listings across Amazon’s stores globally. A key technical challenge in implementing such automated system is the ability to search for protected intellectual property within a vast billion-vector corpus in a fast, scalable and cost effective manner. Leveraging Amazon OpenSearch Service’s scalable vector database capabilities and distributed architecture, we successfully developed an ingestion pipeline that has indexed a total of 68 billion, 128- and 1024-dimension vectors into OpenSearch Service to enable brands and automated systems to conduct infringement detection, in real-time, through a highly available and fast (sub-second) search API.

Conclusion

Whether you’re building a generative AI solution, searching rich media and audio, or bringing more semantic search to your existing search-based application, OpenSearch is a capable vector database. OpenSearch supports a variety of engines, algorithms, and distance measures that you can employ to build the right solution. OpenSearch provides a scalable engine that can support vector search at low latency and up to billions of vectors. With OpenSearch and its vector DB capabilities, your users can find that 8-foot-blue couch easily, and relax by a cozy fire.


About the Authors

Jon Handler is a Senior Principal Solutions Architect with AWSJon Handler is a Senior Principal Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services based in Palo Alto, CA. Jon works closely with OpenSearch and Amazon OpenSearch Service, providing help and guidance to a broad range of customers who have search and log analytics workloads that they want to move to the AWS Cloud. Prior to joining AWS, Jon’s career as a software developer included four years of coding a large-scale, eCommerce search engine. Jon holds a Bachelor of the Arts from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Master of Science and a Ph. D. in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from Northwestern University.

Jianwei Li is a Principal Analytics Specialist TAM at Amazon Web Services. Jianwei provides consultant service for customers to help customer design and build modern data platform. Jianwei has been working in big data domain as software developer, consultant and tech leader.

Dylan Tong is a Senior Product Manager at AWS. He works with customers to help drive their success on the AWS platform through thought leadership and guidance on designing well architected solutions. He has spent most of his career building on his expertise in data management and analytics by working for leaders and innovators in the space.

Vamshi Vijay Nakkirtha is a Software Engineering Manager working on the OpenSearch Project and Amazon OpenSearch Service. His primary interests include distributed systems. He is an active contributor to various plugins, like k-NN, GeoSpatial, and dashboard-maps.

Amazon SageMaker Geospatial Capabilities Now Generally Available with Security Updates and More Use Case Samples

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-sagemaker-geospatial-capabilities-now-generally-available-with-security-updates-and-more-use-case-samples/

At AWS re:Invent 2022, we previewed Amazon SageMaker geospatial capabilities, allowing data scientists and machine learning (ML) engineers to build, train, and deploy ML models using geospatial data. Geospatial ML with Amazon SageMaker supports access to readily available geospatial data, purpose-built processing operations and open source libraries, pre-trained ML models, and built-in visualization tools with Amazon SageMaker’s geospatial capabilities.

During the preview, we had lots of interest and great feedback from customers. Today, Amazon SageMaker geospatial capabilities are generally available with new security updates and additional sample use cases.

Introducing Geospatial ML features with SageMaker Studio
To get started, use the quick setup to launch Amazon SageMaker Studio in the US West (Oregon) Region. Make sure to use the default Jupyter Lab 3 version when you create a new user in the Studio. Now you can navigate to the homepage in SageMaker Studio. Then select the Data menu and click on Geospatial.

Here is an overview of three key Amazon SageMaker geospatial capabilities:

  • Earth Observation jobs – Acquire, transform, and visualize satellite imagery data using purpose-built geospatial operations or pre-trained ML models to make predictions and get useful insights.
  • Vector Enrichment jobs – Enrich your data with operations, such as converting geographical coordinates to readable addresses.
  • Map Visualization – Visualize satellite images or map data uploaded from a CSV, JSON, or GeoJSON file.

You can create all Earth Observation Jobs (EOJ) in the SageMaker Studio notebook to process satellite data using purpose-built geospatial operations. Here is a list of purpose-built geospatial operations that are supported by the SageMaker Studio notebook:

  • Band Stacking – Combine multiple spectral properties to create a single image.
  • Cloud Masking – Identify cloud and cloud-free pixels to get improved and accurate satellite imagery.
  • Cloud Removal – Remove pixels containing parts of a cloud from satellite imagery.
  • Geomosaic – Combine multiple images for greater fidelity.
  • Land Cover Segmentation – Identify land cover types such as vegetation and water in satellite imagery.
  • Resampling – Scale images to different resolutions.
  • Spectral Index – Obtain a combination of spectral bands that indicate the abundance of features of interest.
  • Temporal Statistics – Calculate statistics through time for multiple GeoTIFFs in the same area.
  • Zonal Statistics – Calculate statistics on user-defined regions.

A Vector Enrichment Job (VEJ) enriches your location data through purpose-built operations for reverse geocoding and map matching. While you need to use a SageMaker Studio notebook to execute a VEJ, you can view all the jobs you create using the user interface. To use the visualization in the notebook, you first need to export your output to your Amazon S3 bucket.

  • Reverse Geocoding – Convert coordinates (latitude and longitude) to human-readable addresses.
  • Map Matching – Snap inaccurate GPS coordinates to road segments.

Using the Map Visualization, you can visualize geospatial data, the inputs to your EOJ or VEJ jobs as well as the outputs exported from your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket.

Security Updates
At GA, we have two major security updates—AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) for customer managed AWS KMS key support and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) for geospatial operations in the customer Amazon VPC environment.

AWS KMS customer managed keys offer increased flexibility and control by enabling customers to use their own keys to encrypt geospatial workloads.

You can use KmsKeyId to specify your own key in StartEarthObservationJob and StartVectorEnrichmentJob as an optional parameter. If the customer doesn’t provide KmsKeyId, a service owned key will be used to encrypt the customer content. To learn more, see SageMaker geospatial capabilities AWS KMS Support in the AWS documentation.

Using Amazon VPC, you have full control over your network environment and can more securely connect to your geospatial workloads on AWS. You can use SageMaker Studio or Notebook in your Amazon VPC environment for SageMaker geospatial operations and execute SageMaker geospatial API operations through an interface VPC endpoint in SageMaker geospatial operations.

To get started with Amazon VPC support, configure Amazon VPC on SageMaker Studio Domain and create a SageMaker geospatial VPC endpoint in your VPC in the Amazon VPC console. Choose the service name as com.amazonaws.us-west-2.sagemaker-geospatial and select the VPC in which to create the VPC endpoint.

All Amazon S3 resources that are used for input or output in EOJ and VEJ operations should have internet access enabled. If you have no direct access to those Amazon S3 resources via the internet, you can grant SageMaker geospatial VPC endpoint ID access to it by changing the corresponding S3 bucket policy. To learn more, see SageMaker geospatial capabilities Amazon VPC Support in the AWS documentation.

Example Use Case for Geospatial ML
Customers across various industries use Amazon SageMaker geospatial capabilities for real-world applications.

Maximize Harvest Yield and Food Security
Digital farming consists of applying digital solutions to help farmers optimize crop production in agriculture through the use of advanced analytics and machine learning. Digital farming applications require working with geospatial data, including satellite imagery of the areas where farmers have their fields located.

You can use SageMaker to identify farm field boundaries in satellite imagery through pre-trained models for land cover classification. Learn about How Xarvio accelerated pipelines of spatial data for digital farming with Amazon SageMaker Geospatial in the AWS Machine Learning Blog. You can find an end-to-end digital farming example notebook via the GitHub repository.

Damage Assessment
As the frequency and severity of natural disasters increase, it’s important that we equip decision-makers and first responders with fast and accurate damage assessment. You can use geospatial imagery to predict natural disaster damage and geospatial data in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster to rapidly identify damage to buildings, roads, or other critical infrastructure.

From an example notebook, you can train, deploy, and predict natural disaster damage from the floods in Rochester, Australia, in mid-October 2022. We use images from before and after the disaster as input to its trained ML model. The results of the segmentation mask for the Rochester floods are shown in the following images. Here we can see that the model has identified locations within the flooded region as likely damaged.

You can train and deploy a geospatial segmentation model to assess wildfire damages using multi-temporal Sentinel-2 satellite data via GitHub repository. The area of interest for this example is located in Northern California, from a region that was affected by the Dixie Wildfire in 2021.

Monitor Climate Change
Earth’s climate change increases the risk of drought due to global warming. You can see how to acquire data, perform analysis, and visualize the changes with SageMaker geospatial capabilities to monitor shrinking shoreline caused by climate change in the Lake Mead example, the largest reservoir in the US.

Lake Mead surface area animation

You can find the notebook code for this example in the GitHub repository.

Predict Retail Demand
The new notebook example demonstrates how to use SageMaker geospatial capabilities to perform a vector-based map-matching operation and visualize the results. Map matching allows you to snap noisy GPS coordinates to road segments. With Amazon SageMaker geospatial capabilities, it is possible to perform a VEJ for map matching. This type of job takes a CSV file with route information (such as longitude, latitude, and timestamps of GPS measurements) as input and produces a GeoJSON file that contains the predicted route.

Support Sustainable Urban Development
Arup, one of our customers, uses digital technologies like machine learning to explore the impact of heat on urban areas and the factors that influence local temperatures to deliver better design and support sustainable outcomes. Urban Heat Islands and the associated risks and discomforts are one of the biggest challenges cities are facing today.

Using Amazon SageMaker geospatial capabilities, Arup identifies and measures urban heat factors with earth observation data, which significantly accelerated their ability to counsel clients. It enabled its engineering teams to carry out analytics that weren’t possible previously by providing access to increased volumes, types, and analysis of larger datasets. To learn more, see Facilitating Sustainable City Design Using Amazon SageMaker with Arup in AWS customer stories.

Now Available
Amazon SageMaker geospatial capabilities are now generally available in the US West (Oregon) Region. As part of the AWS Free Tier, you can get started with SageMaker geospatial capabilities for free. The Free Tier lasts 30 days and includes 10 free ml.geospatial.interactive compute hours, up to 10 GB of free storage, and no $150 monthly user fee.

After the 30-day free trial period is complete, or if you exceed the Free Tier limits defined above, you pay for the components outlined on the pricing page.

To learn more, see Amazon SageMaker geospatial capabilities and the Developer Guide. Give it a try and send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon SageMaker or through your usual AWS support contacts.

Channy

Optimizing data with automated intelligent document processing solutions

Post Syndicated from Deependra Shekhawat original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/optimizing-data-with-automated-intelligent-document-processing-solutions/

Many organizations struggle to effectively manage and derive insights from the large amount of unstructured data locked in emails, PDFs, images, scanned documents, and more. The variety of formats, document layouts, and text makes it difficult for any standard Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract key insights from these data sources.

To help organizations overcome these document management and information extraction challenges, AWS offers connected, pre-trained artificial intelligence (AI) service APIs that help drive business outcomes from these document-based rich data sources.

This blog post describes a cost-effective, scalable automated intelligent document processing solution that leverages a Natural Processing Language (NLP) engine using Amazon Textract and Amazon Comprehend. This solution helps customers take advantage of industry leading machine learning (ML) technology in their document workflows without the need for in-house ML expertise.

Customer document management challenges

Customers across industry verticals experience the following document management challenges:

  • Extraction process accuracy varies significantly when applied to diverse sources; specifically handwritten text, images, and scanned documents.
  • Existing scripting and rule-based solutions cannot provide customer domain or problem-specific classifiers.
  • Traditional document management systems cannot consider feedback from domain experts to improve the learning process.
  • The Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data-handling is not robust or customizable, causing data privacy leakage concern.
  • Many manual interventions are required to complete the entire process.

Automated intelligent document processing solution

We introduced an automated intelligent document processing implementation to address key document management challenges. At the heart of the solution is a NLP engine that combines:

The full solution also leverages other AWS services as described in the following diagram (Figure 1) and steps to develop and operate a cost-effective and scalable architecture for document processing. It effectively extracts text from document types including PDFs, images, scanned documents, Microsoft Excel workbooks, and more.

AI-based intelligent document processing engine

Figure 1: AI-based intelligent document processing engine

Solution overview

Let’s explore the automated intelligent document processing solution step by step.

  1. The document upload engine or business users upload the respective files or documents through a custom web application to the designated Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket.
  2. The event-based architecture signals an Amazon S3 push event to invoke the respective AWS Lambda function to start document pre-processing.
  3. The Lambda function evaluates the document payload, leverages Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) for async processing, prepares document metadata, stores it in Amazon DynamoDB, and calls the NLP engine to perform the information extraction process.
  4. The NLP engine leverages Amazon Textract for text extraction from a variety of sources and leverages document metadata to optimize the appropriate API calls (for example, form, tabular, or PDF).
    • Amazon Textract output is fed into Amazon Comprehend which consumes the extracted text and performs entity parsing, line/paragraph-based sentiment analysis, and document/paragraph classification. For better accuracy, we leverage a custom classifier within Amazon Comprehend.
    • Amazon Comprehend also provides key APIs to mask PII data before it is used for any further consumption. The solution offers the ability to configure masking rules for each PII entity per masking requirements.
    • To ensure the solution has capability to handle data from Microsoft Excel workbooks, we developed a custom parser using Python running inside an AWS Lambda function. Depending on the document metadata, this function can be invoked.
  5. Output of Amazon Comprehend is then fed to ML models deployed using Amazon SageMaker depending on additional use cases configured by the customer to complement the overall process with ML-based recommendations, predictions, and personalization.
  6. Once the NLP engine completes its processing, the job completion notification event signals another AWS Lambda function and updates the status in the respective Amazon SQS queue.
  7. The Lambda post-processing function parses the resultant content generated by the NLP engine and stores it in the Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon S3 bucket. This step is responsible for the required data augmentation, key entities validation, and default value assignment to create a data structure that could be consumed by the presentation/visualization layer.
  8. Users get the flexibility to see the extracted information and compare it with the original document extract in the custom user interface (UI). They can provide their feedback on extraction and entity parsing accuracy. From a user access management perspective, Amazon Cognito provides authorization and authentication.

Customer benefits

The automated intelligent document processing solution helps customers:

  • Increase overall document management efficiency by 50-60%, leveraging automation and nullifying manual interventions
  • Reduce in-house team involvement in administrative activities by up to 70% using integrated and connected processing workflows
  • Gain better visibility into key contractual obligations with features such as Document Classification (helps properly route documents to the respective process/team) and Obligation Extraction
  • Utilize a UI-based feedback mechanism for in-house domain experts/reviewers to see and validate the extracted information and offer feedback to inform further model training

From a cost-optimization perspective, depending on document type and required information, only the respective Amazon Textract APIs calls are submitted. (For example, it is not worth using form/table-based Textract API calls for a Know Your Customer (KYC) document such as a driver’s license or passport when the AnalyzeID API is the most efficient solution.)

To maximize solution benefits, customers should invest time in building well-defined taxonomies ahead of using the document processing solution to accommodate their own use cases or industry domain-specific requirements. Their taxonomy input highlights only relevant keys and takes respective actions in case the requires keys are not extracted.

Vertical industry use cases

As mentioned, this document processing solution can be used across industry segments. Let’s explore some practical use cases. For example, it can help insurance industry professionals to accelerate claim processing and customer KYC-related processes. By extracting the key entities from the claim documents, mapping them against the customer defined taxonomy, and integrating with Amazon SageMaker models for anomaly detection (anomalous claims), insurance providers can improve claim management and customer satisfaction.

In the healthcare industry, the solution can help with medical records and report processing, key medical entity extraction, and customer data masking.

The document processing solution can help the banking industry by automating check processing and delivering the ability to extract key entities like payer, payee, date, and amount from the checks.

Conclusion

Manual document processing is resource-intensive, time consuming, and costly. Customers need to allocate resources to process large volume documents, lowering business agility. Their employees are performing manual “stare and compare” tasks, potentially reducing worker morale and preventing them from focusing where their efforts are better placed.

Intelligent document processing helps businesses overcome these challenges by automating the classification, extraction, and analysis of data. This expedites decision cycles, allocates resources to high-value tasks, and reduces costs.

Pre-trained APIs of AWS AI services allow for quick classification, extraction, and data analyzation from scores of documents. This solution also has industry specific features that can quickly process specialized industry specific documents. This blog discussed the foundational architecture to helps to accelerate implementation of any specific document processing use case.

Build a semantic search engine for tabular columns with Transformers and Amazon OpenSearch Service

Post Syndicated from Kachi Odoemene original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/build-a-semantic-search-engine-for-tabular-columns-with-transformers-and-amazon-opensearch-service/

Finding similar columns in a data lake has important applications in data cleaning and annotation, schema matching, data discovery, and analytics across multiple data sources. The inability to accurately find and analyze data from disparate sources represents a potential efficiency killer for everyone from data scientists, medical researchers, academics, to financial and government analysts.

Conventional solutions involve lexical keyword search or regular expression matching, which are susceptible to data quality issues such as absent column names or different column naming conventions across diverse datasets (for example, zip_code, zcode, postalcode).

In this post, we demonstrate a solution for searching for similar columns based on column name, column content, or both. The solution uses approximate nearest neighbors algorithms available in Amazon OpenSearch Service to search for semantically similar columns. To facilitate the search, we create features representations (embeddings) for individual columns in the data lake using pre-trained Transformer models from the sentence-transformers library in Amazon SageMaker. Finally, to interact with and visualize results from our solution, we build an interactive Streamlit web application running on AWS Fargate.

We include a code tutorial for you to deploy the resources to run the solution on sample data or your own data.

Solution overview

The following architecture diagram illustrates the two-stage workflow for finding semantically similar columns. The first stage runs an AWS Step Functions workflow that creates embeddings from tabular columns and builds the OpenSearch Service search index. The second stage, or the online inference stage, runs a Streamlit application through Fargate. The web application collects input search queries and retrieves from the OpenSearch Service index the approximate k-most-similar columns to the query.

Solution architecture

Figure 1. Solution architecture

The automated workflow proceeds in the following steps:

  1. The user uploads tabular datasets into an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket, which invokes an AWS Lambda function that initiates the Step Functions workflow.
  2. The workflow begins with an AWS Glue job that converts the CSV files into Apache Parquet data format.
  3. A SageMaker Processing job creates embeddings for each column using pre-trained models or custom column embedding models. The SageMaker Processing job saves the column embeddings for each table in Amazon S3.
  4. A Lambda function creates the OpenSearch Service domain and cluster to index the column embeddings produced in the previous step.
  5. Finally, an interactive Streamlit web application is deployed with Fargate. The web application provides an interface for the user to input queries to search the OpenSearch Service domain for similar columns.

You can download the code tutorial from GitHub to try this solution on sample data or your own data. Instructions on the how to deploy the required resources for this tutorial are available on Github.

Prerequistes

To implement this solution, you need the following:

  • An AWS account.
  • Basic familiarity with AWS services such as the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), Lambda, OpenSearch Service, and SageMaker Processing.
  • A tabular dataset to create the search index. You can bring your own tabular data or download the sample datasets on GitHub.

Build a search index

The first stage builds the column search engine index. The following figure illustrates the Step Functions workflow that runs this stage.

Step functions workflow

Figure 2 – Step functions workflow – multiple embedding models

Datasets

In this post, we build a search index to include over 400 columns from over 25 tabular datasets. The datasets originate from the following public sources:

For the the full list of the tables included in the index, see the code tutorial on GitHub.

You can bring your own tabular dataset to augment the sample data or build your own search index. We include two Lambda functions that initiate the Step Functions workflow to build the search index for individual CSV files or a batch of CSV files, respectively.

Transform CSV to Parquet

Raw CSV files are converted to Parquet data format with AWS Glue. Parquet is a column-oriented format file format preferred in big data analytics that provides efficient compression and encoding. In our experiments, the Parquet data format offered significant reduction in storage size compared to raw CSV files. We also used Parquet as a common data format to convert other data formats (for example JSON and NDJSON) because it supports advanced nested data structures.

Create tabular column embeddings

To extract embeddings for individual table columns in the sample tabular datasets in this post, we use the following pre-trained models from the sentence-transformers library. For additional models, see Pretrained Models.

Model name Dimension Size (MB)
all-MiniLM-L6-v2 384 80
all-distilroberta-v1 768 290
average_word_embeddings_glove.6B.300d 300 420

The SageMaker Processing job runs create_embeddings.py(code) for a single model. For extracting embeddings from multiple models, the workflow runs parallel SageMaker Processing jobs as shown in the Step Functions workflow. We use the model to create two sets of embeddings:

  • column_name_embeddings – Embeddings of column names (headers)
  • column_content_embeddings – Average embedding of all the rows in the column

For more information about the column embedding process, see the code tutorial on GitHub.

An alternative to the SageMaker Processing step is to create a SageMaker batch transform to get column embeddings on large datasets. This would require deploying the model to a SageMaker endpoint. For more information, see Use Batch Transform.

Index embeddings with OpenSearch Service

In the final step of this stage, a Lambda function adds the column embeddings to a OpenSearch Service approximate k-Nearest-Neighbor (kNN) search index. Each model is assigned its own search index. For more information about the approximate kNN search index parameters, see k-NN.

Online inference and semantic search with a web app

The second stage of the workflow runs a Streamlit web application where you can provide inputs and search for semantically similar columns indexed in OpenSearch Service. The application layer uses an Application Load Balancer, Fargate, and Lambda. The application infrastructure is automatically deployed as part of the solution.

The application allows you to provide an input and search for semantically similar column names, column content, or both. Additionally, you can select the embedding model and number of nearest neighbors to return from the search. The application receives inputs, embeds the input with the specified model, and uses kNN search in OpenSearch Service to search indexed column embeddings and find the most similar columns to the given input. The search results displayed include the table names, column names, and similarity scores for the columns identified, as well as the locations of the data in Amazon S3 for further exploration.

The following figure shows an example of the web application. In this example, we searched for columns in our data lake that have similar Column Names (payload type) to district (payload). The application used all-MiniLM-L6-v2 as the embedding model and returned 10 (k) nearest neighbors from our OpenSearch Service index.

The application returned transit_district, city, borough, and location as the four most similar columns based on the data indexed in OpenSearch Service. This example demonstrates the ability of the search approach to identify semantically similar columns across datasets.

Web application user interface

Figure 3: Web application user interface

Clean up

To delete the resources created by the AWS CDK in this tutorial, run the following command:

cdk destroy --all

Conclusion

In this post, we presented an end-to-end workflow for building a semantic search engine for tabular columns.

Get started today on your own data with our code tutorial available on GitHub. If you’d like help accelerating your use of ML in your products and processes, please contact the Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab.


About the Authors

Kachi Odoemene is an Applied Scientist at AWS AI. He builds AI/ML solutions to solve business problems for AWS customers.

Taylor McNally is a Deep Learning Architect at Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab. He helps customers from various industries build solutions leveraging AI/ML on AWS. He enjoys a good cup of coffee, the outdoors, and time with his family and energetic dog.

Austin Welch is a Data Scientist in the Amazon ML Solutions Lab. He develops custom deep learning models to help AWS public sector customers accelerate their AI and cloud adoption. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, traveling, and jiu-jitsu.

AWS Week in Review – February 27, 2023

Post Syndicated from Antje Barth original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-february-27-2023/

A couple days ago, I had the honor of doing a live stream on generative AI, discussing recent innovations and concepts behind the current generation of large language and vision models and how we got there. In today’s roundup of news and announcements, I will share some additional information—including an expanded partnership to make generative AI more accessible, a blog post about diffusion models, and our weekly Twitch show on Generative AI. Let’s dive right into it!

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some launches that got my attention during the previous week:

Integrated Private Wireless on AWS – The Integrated Private Wireless on AWS program is designed to provide enterprises with managed and validated private wireless offerings from leading communications service providers (CSPs). The offerings integrate CSPs’ private 5G and 4G LTE wireless networks with AWS services across AWS Regions, AWS Local Zones, AWS Outposts, and AWS Snow Family. For more details, read this Industries Blog post and check out this eBook. And, if you’re attending the Mobile World Congress Barcelona this week, stop by the AWS booth at the Upper Walkway, South Entrance, at the Fira Barcelona Gran Via, to learn more.

AWS Glue Crawlers – Now integrate with Lake Formation. AWS Glue Crawlers are used to discover datasets, extract schema information, and populate the AWS Glue Data Catalog. With this Glue Crawler and Lake Formation integration, you can configure a crawler to use Lake Formation permissions to access an S3 data store or a Data Catalog table with an underlying S3 location within the same AWS account or another AWS account. You can configure an existing Data Catalog table as a crawler’s target if the crawler and the Data Catalog table reside in the same account. To learn more, check out this Big Data Blog post.

AWS Glue Crawlers now support integration with AWS Lake Formation

Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor – You can now launch and configure Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor from the SageMaker Model Dashboard using a code-free point-and-click setup experience. SageMaker Model Dashboard gives you unified monitoring across all your models by providing insights into deviations from expected behavior, automated alerts, and troubleshooting to improve model performance. Model Monitor can detect drift in data quality, model quality, bias, and feature attribution and alert you to take remedial actions when such changes occur.

Amazon EKS – Now supports Kubernetes version 1.25. Kubernetes 1.25 introduced several new features and bug fixes, and you can now use Amazon EKS and Amazon EKS Distro to run Kubernetes version 1.25. You can create new 1.25 clusters or upgrade your existing clusters to 1.25 using the Amazon EKS console, the eksctl command line interface, or through an infrastructure-as-code tool. To learn more about this release named “Combiner,” check out this Containers Blog post.

Amazon Detective – New self-paced workshop available. You can now learn to use Amazon Detective with a new self-paced workshop in AWS Workshop Studio. AWS Workshop Studio is a collection of self-paced tutorials designed to teach practical skills and techniques to solve business problems. The Amazon Detective workshop is designed to teach you how to use the primary features of Detective through a series of interactive modules that cover topics such as security alert triage, security incident investigation, and threat hunting. Get started with the Amazon Detective Workshop.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS News
Here are some additional news items and blog posts that you may find interesting:

🤗❤☁ AWS and Hugging Face collaborate to make generative AI more accessible and cost-efficient – This previous week, we announced an expanded collaboration between AWS and Hugging Face to accelerate the training, fine-tuning, and deployment of large language and vision models used to create generative AI applications. Generative AI applications can perform a variety of tasks, including text summarization, answering questions, code generation, image creation, and writing essays and articles. For more details, read this Machine Learning Blog post.

If you are interested in generative AI, I also recommend reading this blog post on how to Fine-tune text-to-image Stable Diffusion models with Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. Stable Diffusion is a deep learning model that allows you to generate realistic, high-quality images and stunning art in just a few seconds. This blog post discusses how to make design choices, including dataset quality, size of training dataset, choice of hyperparameter values, and applicability to multiple datasets.

AWS open-source news and updates – My colleague Ricardo writes this weekly open-source newsletter in which he highlights new open-source projects, tools, and demos from the AWS Community. Read edition #146 here.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

Build On AWS - Generative AI#BuildOn Generative AI – Join our weekly live Build On Generative AI Twitch show. Every Monday morning, 9:00 US PT, my colleagues Emily and Darko take a look at aspects of generative AI. They host developers, scientists, startup founders, and AI leaders and discuss how to build generative AI applications on AWS.

In today’s episode, my colleague Chris walked us through an end-to-end ML pipeline from data ingestion to fine-tuning and deployment of generative AI models. You can watch the video here.

AWS Pi Day 2023 SmallAWS Pi Day – Join me on March 14 for the third annual AWS Pi Day live, virtual event hosted on the AWS On Air channel on Twitch as we celebrate the 17th birthday of Amazon S3 and the cloud.

We will discuss the latest innovations across AWS Data services, from storage to analytics and AI/ML. If you are curious about how AI can transform your business, register here and join my session.

AWS Innovate Data and AI/ML edition – AWS Innovate is a free online event to learn the latest from AWS experts and get step-by-step guidance on using AI/ML to drive fast, efficient, and measurable results. Register now for EMEA (March 9) and the Americas (March 14).

You can browse all upcoming AWS-led in-person, virtual events and developer focused events such as Community Days.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Week in Review!

— Antje

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

AWS Week in Review – January 16, 2023

Post Syndicated from Antje Barth original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-january-16-2023/

Today, we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the US to honor the late civil rights leader’s life, legacy, and achievements. In this article, Amazon employees share what MLK Day means to them and how diversity makes us stronger.

Coming back to our AWS Week in Review—it’s been a busy week!

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some launches that got my attention during the previous week:

AWS Local Zones in Perth and Santiago now generally available – AWS Local Zones help you run latency-sensitive applications closer to end users. AWS now has a total of 29 Local Zones; 12 outside of the US (Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Delhi, Hamburg, Helsinki, Kolkata, Muscat, Perth, Santiago, Taipei, and Warsaw) and 17 in the US. See the full list of available and announced AWS Local Zones and learn how to get started.

AWS Local Zones Locations

AWS Clean Rooms now available in preview – During AWS re:Invent this past November, we announced AWS Clean Rooms, a new analytics service that helps companies across industries easily and securely analyze and collaborate on their combined datasets—without sharing or revealing underlying data. You can now start using AWS Clean Rooms (Preview).

Amazon Kendra updates – Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning (ML) that helps you search across different content repositories with built-in connectors. With the new Amazon Kendra Intelligent Ranking for self-managed OpenSearch, you can now improve the quality of your OpenSearch search results using Amazon Kendra’s ML-powered semantic ranking technology.

Amazon Kendra also released an Amazon S3 connector with VPC support to index and search documents from Amazon S3 hosted in your VPC, a new Google Drive Connector to index and search documents from Google Drive, a Microsoft Teams Connector to enable Microsoft Teams messaging search, and a Microsoft Exchange Connector to enable email-messaging search.

Amazon Personalize updates – Amazon Personalize helps you improve customer engagement through personalized product and content recommendations. Using the new Trending-Now recipe, you can now generate recommendations for items that are rapidly becoming more popular with your users. Amazon Personalize now also supports tag-based resource authorization. Tags are labels in the form of key-value pairs that can be attached to individual Amazon Personalize resources to manage resources or allocate costs.

Amazon SageMaker Canvas now delivers up to 3x faster ML model training time – SageMaker Canvas is a visual interface that enables business analysts to generate accurate ML predictions on their own—without having to write a single line of code. The accelerated model training times help you prototype and experiment more rapidly, shortening the time to generate predictions and turn data into valuable insights.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS News
Here are some additional news items and blog posts that you may find interesting:

AWS open-source news and updates – My colleague Ricardo writes this weekly open-source newsletter in which he highlights new open-source projects, tools, and demos from the AWS Community. Read edition #141 here.

ML model hosting best practices in Amazon SageMaker – This seven-part blog series discusses best practices for ML model hosting in SageMaker to help you identify which hosting design pattern meets your needs best. The blog series also covers advanced concepts such as multi-model endpoints (MME), multi-container endpoints (MCE), serial inference pipelines, and model ensembles. Read part one here.

I would also like to recommend this really interesting Amazon Science article about differential privacy for end-to-end speech recognition. The data used to train AI models is protected by differential privacy (DP), which adds noise during training. In this article, Amazon researchers show how ensembles of teacher models can meet DP constraints while reducing error by more than 26 percent relative to standard DP methods.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

#BuildOnLiveBuild On AWS Live events are a series of technical streams on twitch.tv/aws that focus on technology topics related to challenges hands-on practitioners face today.

  • Join the Build On Live Weekly show about the cloud, the community, the code, and everything in between, hosted by AWS Developer Advocates. The show streams every Thursday at 09:00 US PT on twitch.tv/aws.
  • Join the new The Big Dev Theory show, co-hosted with AWS partners, discussing various topics such as data and AI, AIOps, integration, and security. The show streams every Tuesday at 08:00 US PT on twitch.tv/aws.

Check the AWS Twitch schedule for all shows.

AWS Community Days – AWS Community Day events are community-led conferences that deliver a peer-to-peer learning experience, providing developers with a venue to acquire AWS knowledge in their preferred way: from one another.

AWS Innovate Data and AI/ML edition – AWS Innovate is a free online event to learn the latest from AWS experts and get step-by-step guidance on using AI/ML to drive fast, efficient, and measurable results.

  • AWS Innovate Data and AI/ML edition for Asia Pacific and Japan is taking place on February 22, 2023. Register here.
  • Registrations for AWS Innovate EMEA (March 9, 2023) and the Americas (March 14, 2023) will open soon. Check the AWS Innovate page for updates.

You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Week in Review!

— Antje

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

How BookMyShow saved 80% in costs by migrating to an AWS modern data architecture

Post Syndicated from Mahesh Vandi Chalil original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/how-bookmyshow-saved-80-in-costs-by-migrating-to-an-aws-modern-data-architecture/

This is a guest post co-authored by Mahesh Vandi Chalil, Chief Technology Officer of BookMyShow.

BookMyShow (BMS), a leading entertainment company in India, provides an online ticketing platform for movies, plays, concerts, and sporting events. Selling up to 200 million tickets on an annual run rate basis (pre-COVID) to customers in India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Middle East, BookMyShow also offers an online media streaming service and end-to-end management for virtual and on-ground entertainment experiences across all genres.

The pandemic gave BMS the opportunity to migrate and modernize our 15-year-old analytics solution to a modern data architecture on AWS. This architecture is modern, secure, governed, and cost-optimized architecture, with the ability to scale to petabytes. BMS migrated and modernized from on-premises and other cloud platforms to AWS in just four months. This project was run in parallel with our application migration project and achieved 90% cost savings in storage and 80% cost savings in analytics spend.

The BMS analytics platform caters to business needs for sales and marketing, finance, and business partners (e.g., cinemas and event owners), and provides application functionality for audience, personalization, pricing, and data science teams. The prior analytics solution had multiple copies of data, for a total of over 40 TB, with approximately 80 TB of data in other cloud storage. Data was stored on‑premises and in the cloud in various data stores. Growing organically, the teams had the freedom to choose their technology stack for individual projects, which led to the proliferation of various tools, technology, and practices. Individual teams for personalization, audience, data engineering, data science, and analytics used a variety of products for ingestion, data processing, and visualization.

This post discusses BMS’s migration and modernization journey, and how BMS, AWS, and AWS Partner Minfy Technologies team worked together to successfully complete the migration in four months and saving costs. The migration tenets using the AWS modern data architecture made the project a huge success.

Challenges in the prior analytics platform

  • Varied Technology: Multiple teams used various products, languages, and versions of software.
  • Larger Migration Project: Because the analytics modernization was a parallel project with application migration, planning was crucial in order to consider the changes in core applications and project timelines.
  • Resources: Experienced resource churn from the application migration project, and had very little documentation of current systems.
  • Data : Had multiple copies of data and no single source of truth; each data store provided a view for the business unit.
  • Ingestion Pipelines: Complex data pipelines moved data across various data stores at varied frequencies. We had multiple approaches in place to ingest data to Cloudera, via over 100 Kafka consumers from transaction systems and MQTT(Message Queue Telemetry Transport messaging protocol) for clickstreams, stored procedures, and Spark jobs. We had approximately 100 jobs for data ingestion across Spark, Alteryx, Beam, NiFi, and more.
  • Hadoop Clusters: Large dedicated hardware on which the Hadoop clusters were configured incurring fixed costs. On-premises Cloudera setup catered to most of the data engineering, audience, and personalization batch processing workloads. Teams had their implementation of HBase and Hive for our audience and personalization applications.
  • Data warehouse: The data engineering team used TiDB as their on-premises data warehouse. However, each consumer team had their own perspective of data needed for analysis. As this siloed architecture evolved, it resulted in expensive storage and operational costs to maintain these separate environments.
  • Analytics Database: The analytics team used data sourced from other transactional systems and denormalized data. The team had their own extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipeline, using Alteryx with a visualization tool.

Migration tenets followed which led to project success:

  • Prioritize by business functionality.
  • Apply best practices when building a modern data architecture from Day 1.
  • Move only required data, canonicalize the data, and store it in the most optimal format in the target. Remove data redundancy as much possible. Mark scope for optimization for the future when changes are intrusive.
  • Build the data architecture while keeping data formats, volumes, governance, and security in mind.
  • Simplify ELT and processing jobs by categorizing the jobs as rehosted, rewritten, and retired. Finalize canonical data format, transformation, enrichment, compression, and storage format as Parquet.
  • Rehost machine learning (ML) jobs that were critical for business.
  • Work backward to achieve our goals, and clear roadblocks and alter decisions to move forward.
  • Use serverless options as a first option and pay per use. Assess the cost and effort for rearchitecting to select the right approach. Execute a proof of concept to validate this for each component and service.

Strategies applied to succeed in this migration:

  • Team – We created a unified team with people from data engineering, analytics, and data science as part of the analytics migration project. Site reliability engineering (SRE) and application teams were involved when critical decisions were needed regarding data or timeline for alignment. The analytics, data engineering, and data science teams spent considerable time planning, understanding the code, and iteratively looking at the existing data sources, data pipelines, and processing jobs. AWS team with partner team from Minfy Technologies helped BMS arrive at a migration plan after a proof of concept for each of the components in data ingestion, data processing, data warehouse, ML, and analytics dashboards.
  • Workshops – The AWS team conducted a series of workshops and immersion days, and coached the BMS team on the technology and best practices to deploy the analytics services. The AWS team helped BMS explore the configuration and benefits of the migration approach for each scenario (data migration, data pipeline, data processing, visualization, and machine learning) via proof-of-concepts (POCs). The team captured the changes required in the existing code for migration. BMS team also got acquainted with the following AWS services:
  • Proof of concept – The BMS team, with help from the partner and AWS team, implemented multiple proofs of concept to validate the migration approach:
    • Performed batch processing of Spark jobs in Amazon EMR, in which we checked the runtime, required code changes, and cost.
    • Ran clickstream analysis jobs in Amazon EMR, testing the end-to-end pipeline. Team conducted proofs of concept on AWS IoT Core for MQTT protocol and streaming to Amazon S3.
    • Migrated ML models to Amazon SageMaker and orchestrated with Amazon MWAA.
    • Created sample QuickSight reports and dashboards, in which features and time to build were assessed.
    • Configured for key scenarios for Amazon Redshift, in which time for loading data, query performance, and cost were assessed.
  • Effort vs. cost analysis – Team performed the following assessments:
    • Compared the ingestion pipelines, the difference in data structure in each store, the basis of the current business need for the data source, the activity for preprocessing the data before migration, data migration to Amazon S3, and change data capture (CDC) from the migrated applications in AWS.
    • Assessed the effort to migrate approximately 200 jobs, determined which jobs were redundant or need improvement from a functional perspective, and completed a migration list for the target state. The modernization of the MQTT workflow code to serverless was time-consuming, decided to rehost on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and modernization to Amazon Kinesis in to the next phase.
    • Reviewed over 400 reports and dashboards, prioritized development in phases, and reassessed business user needs.

AWS cloud services chosen for proposed architecture:

  • Data lake – We used Amazon S3 as the data lake to store the single truth of information for all raw and processed data, thereby reducing the copies of data storage and storage costs.
  • Ingestion – Because we had multiple sources of truth in the current architecture, we arrived at a common structure before migration to Amazon S3, and existing pipelines were modified to do preprocessing. These one-time preprocessing jobs were run in Cloudera, because the source data was on-premises, and on Amazon EMR for data in the cloud. We designed new data pipelines for ingestion from transactional systems on the AWS cloud using AWS Glue ETL.
  • Processing – Processing jobs were segregated based on runtime into two categories: batch and near-real time. Batch processes were further divided into transient Amazon EMR clusters with varying runtimes and Hadoop application requirements like HBase. Near-real-time jobs were provisioned in an Amazon EMR permanent cluster for clickstream analytics, and a data pipeline from transactional systems. We adopted a serverless approach using AWS Glue ETL for new data pipelines from transactional systems on the AWS cloud.
  • Data warehouse – We chose Amazon Redshift as our data warehouse, and planned on how the data would be distributed based on query patterns.
  • Visualization – We built the reports in Amazon QuickSight in phases and prioritized them based on business demand. We discussed with business users their current needs and identified the immediate reports required. We defined the phases of report and dashboard creation and built the reports in Amazon QuickSight. We plan to use embedded reports for external users in the future.
  • Machine learning – Custom ML models were deployed on Amazon SageMaker. Existing Airflow DAGs were migrated to Amazon MWAA.
  • Governance, security, and compliance – Governance with Amazon Lake Formation was adopted from Day 1. We configured the AWS Glue Data Catalog to reference data used as sources and targets. We had to comply to Payment Card Industry (PCI) guidelines because payment information was in the data lake, so we ensured the necessary security policies.

Solution overview

BMS modern data architecture

The following diagram illustrates our modern data architecture.

The architecture includes the following components:

  1. Source systems – These include the following:
    • Data from transactional systems stored in MariaDB (booking and transactions).
    • User interaction clickstream data via Kafka consumers to DataOps MariaDB.
    • Members and seat allocation information from MongoDB.
    • SQL Server for specific offers and payment information.
  2. Data pipeline – Spark jobs on an Amazon EMR permanent cluster process the clickstream data from Kafka clusters.
  3. Data lake – Data from source systems was stored in their respective Amazon S3 buckets, with prefixes for optimized data querying. For Amazon S3, we followed a hierarchy to store raw, summarized, and team or service-related data in different parent folders as per the source and type of data. Lifecycle polices were added to logs and temp folders of different services as per teams’ requirements.
  4. Data processing – Transient Amazon EMR clusters are used for processing data into a curated format for the audience, personalization, and analytics teams. Small file merger jobs merge the clickstream data to a larger file size, which saved costs for one-time queries.
  5. Governance – AWS Lake Formation enables the usage of AWS Glue crawlers to capture the schema of data stored in the data lake and version changes in the schema. The Data Catalog and security policy in AWS Lake Formation enable access to data for roles and users in Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, Amazon QuickSight, and data science jobs. AWS Glue ETL jobs load the processed data to Amazon Redshift at scheduled intervals.
  6. Queries – The analytics team used Amazon Athena to perform one-time queries raised from business teams on the data lake. Because report development is in phases, Amazon Athena was used for exporting data.
  7. Data warehouse – Amazon Redshift was used as the data warehouse, where the reports for the sales teams, management, and third parties (i.e., theaters and events) are processed and stored for quick retrieval. Views to analyze the total sales, movie sale trends, member behavior, and payment modes are configured here. We use materialized views for denormalized tables, different schemas for metadata, and transactional and behavior data.
  8. Reports – We used Amazon QuickSight reports for various business, marketing, and product use cases.
  9. Machine learning – Some of the models deployed on Amazon SageMaker are as follows:
    • Content popularity – Decides the recommended content for users.
    • Live event popularity – Calculates the popularity of live entertainment events in different regions.
    • Trending searches – Identifies trending searches across regions.

Walkthrough

Migration execution steps

We standardized tools, services, and processes for data engineering, analytics, and data science:

  • Data lake
    • Identified the source data to be migrated from Archival DB, BigQuery, TiDB, and the analytics database.
    • Built a canonical data model that catered to multiple business teams and reduced the copies of data, and therefore storage and operational costs. Modified existing jobs to facilitate migration to a canonical format.
    • Identified the source systems, capacity required, anticipated growth, owners, and access requirements.
    • Ran the bulk data migration to Amazon S3 from various sources.
  • Ingestion
    • Transaction systems – Retained the existing Kafka queues and consumers.
    • Clickstream data – Successfully conducted a proof of concept to use AWS IoT Core for MQTT protocol. But because we needed to make changes in the application to publish to AWS IoT Core, we decided to implement it as part of mobile application modernization at a later time. We decided to rehost the MQTT server on Amazon EC2.
  • Processing
  • Listed the data pipelines relevant to business and migrated them with minimal modification.
  • Categorized workloads into critical jobs, redundant jobs, or jobs that can be optimized:
    • Spark jobs were migrated to Amazon EMR.
    • HBase jobs were migrated to Amazon EMR with HBase.
    • Metadata stored in Hive-based jobs were modified to use the AWS Glue Data Catalog.
    • NiFi jobs were simplified and rewritten in Spark run in Amazon EMR.
  • Amazon EMR clusters were configured one persistent cluster for streaming the clickstream and personalization workloads. We used multiple transient clusters for running all other Spark ETL or processing jobs. We used Spot Instances for task nodes to save costs. We optimized data storage with specific jobs to merge small files and compressed file format conversions.
  • AWS Glue crawlers identified new data in Amazon S3. AWS Glue ETL jobs transformed and uploaded processed data to the Amazon Redshift data warehouse.
  • Datawarehouse
    • Defined the data warehouse schema by categorizing the critical reports required by the business, keeping in mind the workload and reports required in future.
    • Defined the staging area for incremental data loaded into Amazon Redshift, materialized views, and tuning the queries based on usage. The transaction and primary metadata are stored in Amazon Redshift to cater to all data analysis and reporting requirements. We created materialized views and denormalized tables in Amazon Redshift to use as data sources for Amazon QuickSight dashboards and segmentation jobs, respectively.
    • Optimally used the Amazon Redshift cluster by loading last two years data in Amazon Redshift, and used Amazon Redshift Spectrum to query historical data through external tables. This helped balance the usage and cost of the Amazon Redshift cluster.
  • Visualization
    • Amazon QuickSight dashboards were created for the sales and marketing team in Phase 1:
      • Sales summary report – An executive summary dashboard to get an overview of sales across the country by region, city, movie, theatre, genre, and more.
      • Live entertainment – A dedicated report for live entertainment vertical events.
      • Coupons – A report for coupons purchased and redeemed.
      • BookASmile – A dashboard to analyze the data for BookASmile, a charity initiative.
  • Machine learning
    • Listed the ML workloads to be migrated based on current business needs.
    • Priority ML processing jobs were deployed on Amazon EMR. Models were modified to use Amazon S3 as source and target, and new APIs were exposed to use the functionality. ML models were deployed on Amazon SageMaker for movies, live event clickstream analysis, and personalization.
    • Existing artifacts in Airflow orchestration were migrated to Amazon MWAA.
  • Security
    • AWS Lake Formation was the foundation of the data lake, with the AWS Glue Data Catalog as the foundation for the central catalog for the data stored in Amazon S3. This provided access to the data by various functionalities, including the audience, personalization, analytics, and data science teams.
    • Personally identifiable information (PII) and payment data was stored in the data lake and data warehouse, so we had to comply to PCI guidelines. Encryption of data at rest and in transit was considered and configured in each service level (Amazon S3, AWS Glue Data Catalog, Amazon EMR, AWS Glue, Amazon Redshift, and QuickSight). Clear roles, responsibilities, and access permissions for different user groups and privileges were listed and configured in AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and individual services.
    • Existing single sign-on (SSO) integration with Microsoft Active Directory was used for Amazon QuickSight user access.
  • Automation
    • We used AWS CloudFormation for the creation and modification of all the core and analytics services.
    • AWS Step Functions was used to orchestrate Spark jobs on Amazon EMR.
    • Scheduled jobs were configured in AWS Glue for uploading data in Amazon Redshift based on business needs.
    • Monitoring of the analytics services was done using Amazon CloudWatch metrics, and right-sizing of instances and configuration was achieved. Spark job performance on Amazon EMR was analyzed using the native Spark logs and Spark user interface (UI).
    • Lifecycle policies were applied to the data lake to optimize the data storage costs over time.

Benefits of a modern data architecture

A modern data architecture offered us the following benefits:

  • Scalability – We moved from a fixed infrastructure to the minimal infrastructure required, with configuration to scale on demand. Services like Amazon EMR and Amazon Redshift enable us to do this with just a few clicks.
  • Agility – We use purpose-built managed services instead of reinventing the wheel. Automation and monitoring were key considerations, which enable us to make changes quickly.
  • Serverless – Adoption of serverless services like Amazon S3, AWS Glue, Amazon Athena, AWS Step Functions, and AWS Lambda support us when our business has sudden spikes with new movies or events launched.
  • Cost savings – Our storage size was reduced by 90%. Our overall spend on analytics and ML was reduced by 80%.

Conclusion

In this post, we showed you how a modern data architecture on AWS helped BMS to easily share data across organizational boundaries. This allowed BMS to make decisions with speed and agility at scale; ensure compliance via unified data access, security, and governance; and to scale systems at a low cost without compromising performance. Working with the AWS and Minfy Technologies teams helped BMS choose the correct technology services and complete the migration in four months. BMS achieved the scalability and cost-optimization goals with this updated architecture, which has set the stage for innovation using graph databases and enhanced our ML projects to improve customer experience.


About the Authors

Mahesh Vandi Chalil is Chief Technology Officer at BookMyShow, India’s leading entertainment destination. Mahesh has over two decades of global experience, passionate about building scalable products that delight customers while keeping innovation as the top goal motivating his team to constantly aspire for these. Mahesh invests his energies in creating and nurturing the next generation of technology leaders and entrepreneurs, both within the organization and outside of it. A proud husband and father of two daughters and plays cricket during his leisure time.

Priya Jathar is a Solutions Architect working in Digital Native Business segment at AWS. She has more two decades of IT experience, with expertise in Application Development, Database, and Analytics. She is a builder who enjoys innovating with new technologies to achieve business goals. Currently helping customers Migrate, Modernise, and Innovate in Cloud. In her free time she likes to paint, and hone her gardening and cooking skills.

Vatsal Shah is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS based out of Mumbai, India. He has more than nine years of industry experience, including leadership roles in product engineering, SRE, and cloud architecture. He currently focuses on enabling large startups to streamline their cloud operations and help them scale on the cloud. He also specializes in AI and Machine Learning use cases.

Create, Train and Deploy Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP) models using Amazon Redshift ML

Post Syndicated from Anuradha Karlekar original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/create-train-and-deploy-multi-layer-perceptron-mlp-models-using-amazon-redshift-ml/

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed and petabyte-scale cloud data warehouse which is being used by tens of thousands of customers to process exabytes of data every day to power their analytics workloads. Amazon Redshift comes with a feature called Amazon Redshift ML which puts the power of machine learning in the hands of every data warehouse user, without requiring the users to learn any new programming language, ML concepts or ML tools. Redshift ML abstracts all the intricacies that are involved in the traditional ML approach around data warehouse which traditionally involved repetitive, manual steps to move data back and forth between the data warehouse and ML tools for running long, complex, iterative ML workflow.

Redshift ML uses Amazon SageMaker Autopilot and Amazon SageMaker Neo in the background to make it easy for SQL users such as data analysts, data scientists, BI experts and database developers to create, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models using familiar SQL commands and then use these models to make predictions on new data for use cases such as customer churn prediction, basket analysis for sales prediction, manufacturing unit lifetime value prediction, and product recommendations. Redshift ML makes the model available as SQL function within the Amazon Redshift data warehouse so you can easily use it in queries and reports.

Amazon Redshift ML supports supervised learning, including regression, binary classification, multi-class classification, and unsupervised learning using K-Means. You can optionally specify XGBoost, MLP, and linear learner model types, which are supervised learning algorithms used for solving either classification or regression problems, and provide a significant increase in speed over traditional hyperparameter optimization techniques. Amazon Redshift ML also supports bring-your-own-model to either import existing SageMaker models that are built using algorithms supported by SageMaker Autopilot, which can be used for local inference; or for the unsupported algorithms, one can alternatively invoke remote SageMaker endpoints for remote inference.

In this blog post, we show you how to use Redshift ML to solve binary classification problem using the Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP) algorithm, which explores different training objectives and chooses the best solution from the validation set.

A multilayer perceptron (MLP) is a deep learning method which deals with training multi-layer artificial neural networks, also called Deep Neural Networks. It is a feedforward artificial neural network that generates a set of outputs from a set of inputs. An MLP is characterized by several layers of input nodes connected as a directed graph between the input and output layers. MLP uses backpropagation for training the network. MLP is widely used for solving problems that require supervised learning as well as research into computational neuroscience and parallel distributed processing. It is also used for speech recognition, image recognition and machine translation.

As far as MLP usage with Redshift ML (powered by Amazon SageMaker Autopilot) is concerned, it supports tabular data as of now.

Solution Overview

To use the MLP algorithm, you need to provide inputs or columns representing dimensional values and also the label or target, which is the value you’re trying to predict.

With Redshift ML, you can use MLP on tabular data for regression, binary classification or multiclass classification problems. What is more unique about MLP is, is that the output function of MLP can be a linear or a continuous function as well. It need not be a straight line like the general regression model provides.

In this solution, we use binary classification to detect frauds based upon the credit cards transaction data. The difference between classification models and MLP is that logistic regression uses a logistic function, while perceptrons use a step function. Using the multilayer perceptron model, machines can learn weight coefficients that help them classify inputs. This linear binary classifier is highly effective in arranging and categorizing input data into different classes, allowing probability-based predictions and classifying items into multiple categories. Multilayer Perceptrons have the advantage of learning non-linear models and the ability to train models in real-time.

For this solution, we first ingest the data into Amazon Redshift, we then distribute it for model training and validation, then use Amazon Redshift ML specific queries for model creation and thereby create and utilize the generated SQL function for being able to finally predict the fraudulent transactions.

Prerequisites

To get started, we need an Amazon Redshift cluster or an Amazon Redshift Serverless endpoint and an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role attached that provides access to SageMaker and permissions to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket.

For an introduction to Redshift ML and instructions on setting it up, see Create, train, and deploy machine learning models in Amazon Redshift using SQL with Amazon Redshift ML.

To create a simple cluster with a default IAM role, see Use the default IAM role in Amazon Redshift to simplify accessing other AWS services.

Data Set Used

In this post, we use the Credit Card Fraud detection data to create, train and deploy MLP model which can be used further to identify fraudulent transactions from the newly captured transaction records.

The dataset contains transactions made by credit cards in September 2013 by European cardholders.
This dataset presents transactions that occurred in two days, where we have 492 frauds out of 284,807 transactions. The dataset is highly unbalanced, the positive class (frauds) account for 0.172% of all transactions.

It contains only numerical input variables which are the result of a Principal Component Analysis transformation. Due to confidentiality issues, the original features and more background information about the data is not provided. Features V1, V2, … V28 are the principal components obtained with PCA, the only features which have not been transformed with PCA are ‘Time’ and ‘Amount’. Feature ‘Time’ contains the seconds elapsed between each transaction and the first transaction in the dataset. The feature ‘Amount’ is the transaction Amount. Feature ‘Class’ is the response variable and it takes value 1 in case of fraud and 0 otherwise.

Here are sample records:

Prepare the data

Load the credit card dataset into Amazon Redshift using the following SQL. You can use the Amazon Redshift query editor v2 or your preferred SQL tool to run these commands.

Alternately we have provided a notebook you may use to execute all the sql commands that can be downloaded here. You will find instructions in this blog on how to import and use notebooks.

To create the table, use the following command:

CREATE TABLE creditcardsfrauds (
    txtime integer,
    v1 float8,
    v2 float8,
    v3 float8,
    v4 float8,
    v5 float8,
    v6 float8,
    v7 float8,
    v8 float8,
    v9 float8,
    v10 float8,
    v11 float8,
    v12 float8,
    v13 float8,
    v14 float8,
    v15 float8,
    v16 float8,
    v17 float8,
    v18 float8,
    v19 float8,
    v20 float8,
    v21 float8,
    v22 float8,
    v23 float8,
    v24 float8,
    v25 float8,
    v26 float8,
    v27 float8,
    v28 float8,
    amount float8,
    class integer
);

Load the data

To load data into Amazon Redshift, use the following COPY command:

COPY creditcardsfrauds
FROM 's3://redshift-ml-blog-mlp/creditcard.csv' 
IAM_ROLE default
CSV QUOTE as '\"' delimiter ',' IGNOREHEADER 1 maxerror 100
REGION 'us-east-1';

Before creating the model, we want to divide our data into two sets by splitting 80% of the dataset for training and 20% for validation, which is a common practice in ML. The training data is input to the ML model to identify the best possible algorithm for the model. After the model is created, we use the validation data to validate the model accuracy.

So, in ‘creditcardsfrauds’ table, we check the distribution of data based upon ‘txtime’ value and identify the cutoff for around 80% of the data to train the model.

With this, the highest txtime value comes to 120954 (based upon the distribution of txtime’s min, max, ranking by window function and ceil(count(*)*0.80) values)), based upon which we consider the transaction records having ‘txtime’ field value less than 120954 for creating training data. We then validate the accuracy of that model by seeing if it correctly identifies the fraudulent transactions by predicting its ‘class’ attribute on the remaining 20% of the data.

This distribution for 80% cutoff need not always be based upon ordered time. It can be picked up randomly as well, based upon the use case under consideration.

Create a model in Redshift ML

To create the model, use the following command:

 CREATE model creditcardsfrauds_mlp
FROM (select * from creditcardsfrauds where txtime < 120954)
TARGET class 
FUNCTION creditcardsfrauds_mlp_fn
IAM_ROLE default
MODEL_TYPE MLP
SETTINGS (
      S3_BUCKET '<<your-amazon-s3-bucket-name>>’,
      MAX_RUNTIME 9600
);

Here, in the settings section of the command, you need to set up an S3_BUCKET which is used to export the data that is sent to SageMaker and store model artifacts.

S3_BUCKET setting is a required parameter of the command, whereas MAX_RUNTIME is an optional one which specifies the maximum amount of time to train. The default value of this parameter is 90 minutes (5400 seconds), however you can override it by explicitly specifying it in the command, just like we have done it here by setting it to run for 9600 seconds.

The preceding statement initiates an Amazon SageMaker Autopilot process in the background to automatically build, train, and tune the best ML model for the input data. It then uses Amazon SageMaker Neo to deploy that model locally in the Amazon Redshift cluster or Amazon Redshift Serverless as a user-defined function (UDF).

You can use the SHOW MODEL command in Amazon Redshift to track the progress of your model creation, which should be in the READY state within the max_runtime parameter you defined while creating the model.

To check the status of the model, use the following command:

show model creditcardsfrauds_mlp;

We notice from the preceding table that the F1-score for the training data is 0.908, which shows very good performance accuracy.

To elaborate, F1-score is the harmonic mean of precision and recall. It combines precision and recall into a single number using the following formula:

Where, Precision means: Of all positive predictions, how many are really positive?

And Recall means: Of all real positive cases, how many are predicted positive?

F1 scores can range from 0 to 1, with 1 representing a model that perfectly classifies each observation into the correct class and 0 representing a model that is unable to classify any observation into the correct class. So higher F1 scores are better.

The following is the detailed tabular outcome for the preceding command after model training was done.

Model Name creditcardsfrauds_mlp
Schema Name public
Owner redshiftml
Creation Time Sun, 25.09.2022 16:07:18
Model State READY
validation:binary_f_beta 0.908864
Estimated Cost 112.296925
TRAINING DATA: .
Query SELECT * FROM CREDITCARDSFRAUDS WHERE TXTIME < 120954
Target Column CLASS
PARAMETERS: .
Model Type mlp
Problem Type BinaryClassification
Objective F1
AutoML Job Name redshiftml-20221118035728881011
Function Name creditcardsfrauds_mlp_fn
. creditcardsfrauds_mlp_fn_prob
Function Parameters txtime v1 v2 v3 v4 v5 v6 v7 v8 v9 v10 v11 v12 v13 v14 v15 v16 v17 v18 v19 v20 v21 v22 v23 v24 v25 v26 v27 v28 amount
Function Parameter Types int4 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8 float8
IAM Role default
S3 Bucket redshift-ml-blog-mlp
Max Runtime 54000

Redshift ML now supports Prediction Probabilities for binary classification models. For classification problem in machine learning, for a given record, each label can be associated with a probability that indicates how likely this record really belongs to the label. With option to have probabilities along with the label, customers could use the classification results when confidence based on chosen label is higher than a certain threshold value returned by the model

Prediction probabilities are calculated by default for binary classification models and an additional function is created while creating model without impacting performance of the ML model.

In above snippet, you will notice that predication probabilities enhancements have added another function as a suffix (_prob) to model function with a name ‘creditcardsfrauds_mlp_fn_prob’ which could be used to get prediction probabilities.

Additionally, you can check the model explainability to understand which inputs contributed effectively to derive the prediction.

Model explainability helps to understand the cause of prediction by answering questions such as:

  • Why did the model predict a negative outcome such as blocking of credit card when someone travels to a different country and withdraws a lot of money in different currency?
  • How does the model make predictions? Lots of data for credit cards can be put in a tabular format and as per MLP process where a fully connected neural network of several layers is involved, we can tell which input feature actually contributed to the model output and its magnitude.
  • Why did the model make an incorrect prediction? E.g. Why is the card blocked even though the transaction is legitimate?
  • Which features have the largest influence on the behavior of the model? Is it just based upon the location where the credit card is swiped, or even the time of the day and unusual credit consumption that is influencing the prediction?

Run the following SQL command to retrieve the values from the explainability report:

SELECT json_table.report.explanations.kernel_shap.label0.global_shap_values 
FROM (select explain_model('creditcardsfrauds_mlp') as report) as json_table;

In the preceding screenshot, we have only selected the column that projects shapley values from the response returned by the explain_model function. If you notice the response of the query, the values in every json object show the contribution of different features in terms of influencing the prediction. E.g. from the preceding snippet, v14 feature is influencing the prediction the most and txtime feature does not really play any significant role in predicting ‘class’.

Model validation

Now let’s run the prediction query and validate the accuracy of the model on the validation dataset:

FROM (
  SELECT 
      CASE WHEN class =  
      creditcardsfrauds_mlp_fn(txtime,v1,v2,v3,v4,v5,v6,v7,v8,v9,v10,v11,v12,v13,v14,v15,v16,v17,v18,v19,v20,v21,v22,v23,v24,v25,v26,v27,v28,amount) 
      THEN 'PredictedMatchesActual' 
      else 'NoMatch' 
      END as actualvspredicted
    FROM creditcardsfrauds 
    WHERE txtime >= 120954
) 
group by actualvspredicted

We can observe here that Redshift ML is able to identify 99.88 percent of the transactions correctly as fraudulent or non-fraudulent.

Now you can continue to use this SQL function creditcardsfrauds_mlp_fn for local inference in any part of the SQL query while analyzing, visualizing or reporting the newly arriving as well as existing data!

--CREATE A STAGING TABLE TO HOLD NEWLY ARRIVING DATA FROM THE SOURCE WHICH WILL NOT CONAIN THE CLASS COLUMN - AS IT IS TO BE PREDICTED
DROP TABLE creditcardsfrauds_staging;
CREATE TABLE creditcardsfrauds_staging as (select * from creditcardsfrauds limit 0);
Alter table creditcardsfrauds_staging drop column class;

--LETS CONSIDER ONLY ONE RECORD HERE WHICH HAS NEWLY ARRIVED
insert into creditcardsfrauds_staging values(174965,-39999.11383160738512,0.58586417180689,-5.39973021073242,1.81709247345531,-0.840618465991056,-2.94354779071974,-2.20800192003372,1.05873267723056,-1.63233334974982,-5000.24598383776964,11.93351953683592,-53046479695456,-1.12745457501155,-666666.41662797597451,0.141237234328704,-2.54949823633632,-4.61471706851594,-10.47813794126038,-0.0354803664667244,0.306270740368093,0.583275998701341,-0.269208637986581,-0.456107772584008,-0.183659129549716,-0.328167759255761,0.606115810329683,0.884875539542905,-0.253700318894381,-2450000000);

--USE THE FUNCTION TO PREDICT THE VALUE OF CLASS
SELECT txtime, creditcardsfrauds_mlp_fn(txtime,v1,v2,v3,v4,v5,v6,v7,v8,v9,v10,v11,v12,v13,v14,v15,v16,v17,v18,v19,v20,v21,v22,v23,v24,v25,v26,v27,v28,amount)
FROM creditcardsfrauds_staging;

Here the output 1 means that the newly captured transaction is fraudulent as per the inference.

Additionally, you can change the above query to include prediction probabilities of label output for the above scenario and decide if you still like to use the prediction by the model.

--USE THE FUNCTION TO PREDICT THE VALUE OF CLASS ALONG WITH THE PROBABILITY
Select txtime, predictedActive.labels[0], predictedActive.probabilities[0] 
from (
SELECT txtime, creditcardsfrauds_mlp_fn_prob(txtime,v1,v2,v3,v4,v5,v6,v7,v8,v9,v10,v11,v12,v13,v14,v15,v16,v17,v18,v19,v20,v21,v22,v23,v24,v25,v26,v27,v28,amount)as predictedACtive
FROM creditcardsfrauds_staging ) temp

The above screenshot shows that this transaction has 100% likelihood of being fraudulent.

Clean up

To avoid incurring future charges, you can stop the Redshift cluster when not being used. You can even terminate the Redshift cluster altogether if you have run the exercise in this blog post just for experimental purpose. If you are instead using serverless version of Redshift, it will not cost you anything, until it is used. However, like mentioned before, you will have to stop or terminate the cluster if you are using a provisioned version of Redshift.

Conclusion

Redshift ML makes it easy for users of all levels to create, train, and tune models using SQL interface. In this post, we walked you through how to use the MLP algorithm to create binary classification model. You can then use those models to make predictions using simple SQL commands and gain valuable insights.

To learn more about RedShift ML, visit Amazon Redshift ML.


About the authors

Anuradha Karlekar is a Solutions Architect at AWS working majorly for Partners and Startups. She has over 15 years of IT experience extensively in full stack development, deployment, building data ETL pipelines and visualizations. She is passionate about data analytics and text search. Outside work – She is a travel enthusiast!

Phil Bates is a Senior Analytics Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS with over 25 years of data warehouse experience.

Abhishek Pan is a Solutions Architect-Analytics working at AWS India. He engages with customers to define data driven strategy, provide deep dive sessions on analytics use cases & design  scalable and performant Analytical applications. He has over 11 years of experience and is passionate about Databases, Analytics and solving customer problems with help of cloud solutions. An avid traveller and tries to capture world through my lenses

Debu Panda is a Senior Manager, Product Management at AWS, is an industry leader in analytics, application platform, and database technologies, and has more than 25 years of experience in the IT world. Debu has published numerous articles on analytics, enterprise Java, and databases and has presented at multiple conferences such as re:Invent, Oracle Open World, and Java One. He is lead author of the EJB 3 in Action (Manning Publications 2007, 2014) and Middleware Management (Packt).

AWS Week in Review – December 12, 2022

Post Syndicated from Marcia Villalba original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-december-12-2022/

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

The world is asynchronous, is what Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO, reminded us during his keynote last week at AWS re:Invent. At the beginning of the keynote, he showed us how weird a synchronous world would be and how everything in nature is asynchronous. One example of an event-driven application he showcased during his keynote is Serverlesspresso, a project my team has been working on for the last year. And last week, we announced Serverlesspresso extensions, a new program that lets you contribute to Serverlesspresso and learn how event-driven applications can be extended.

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some launches that got my attention during the previous week.

Amazon SageMaker Studio now supports fine-grained data access control with AWS LakeFormation when accessing data through Amazon EMR. Now, when you connect to EMR clusters to SageMaker Studio notebooks, you can choose what runtime IAM role you want to connect with, and the notebooks will only access data and resources permitted by the attached runtime role.

Amazon Lex has now added support for Arabic, Cantonese, Norwegian, Swedish, Polish, and Finnish. This opens new possibilities to create chat bots and conversational experiences in more languages.

Amazon RDS Proxy now supports creating proxies in Amazon Aurora Global Database primary and secondary Regions. Now, building multi-Region applications with Amazon Aurora is simpler. RDS proxy sits between your application and the database pool and shares established database connections.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP launched many new features. First, it added the support for Nitro-based encryption of data in transit. It also extended NVMe read cache support to Single-AZ file systems. And it added four new features to ease the use of the service: easily assign a snapshot policy to your volumes, easily create data protection volumes, configure volumes so their tags are automatically copied to the backups, and finally, add or remove VPC route tables for your existing Multi-AZ file systems.

I would also like to mention two launches that happened before re:Invent but were not covered on the News Blog:

Amazon EventBridge Scheduler is a new capability from Amazon EventBridge that allows you to create, run, and manage scheduled tasks at scale. Using this new capability, you can schedule one-time or recurrent tasks across 270 AWS services.

AWS IoT RoboRunner is now generally available. Last year at re:Invent Channy wrote a blog post introducing the preview for this service. IoT RoboRunner is a robotic service that makes it easier to build and deploy applications for fleets of robots working seamlessly together.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS News
Some other updates and news that you may have missed:

I would like to recommend this really interesting Amazon Science article about federated learning. This is a framework that allows edge devices to work together to train a global model while keeping customers’ data on-device.

Podcast Charlas Técnicas de AWS – If you understand Spanish, this podcast is for you. Podcast Charlas Técnicas is one of the official AWS podcasts in Spanish, and every other week there is a new episode. Today the final episode for season three launched, and in it, we discussed many of the re:Invent launches. You can listen to all the episodes directly from your favorite podcast app or at AWS Podcasts en español.

AWS open-source news and updates–This is a newsletter curated by my colleague Ricardo to bring you the latest open-source projects, posts, events, and more.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

AWS Resiliency Hub Activation Day is a half-day technical virtual session to deep dive into the features and functionality of Resiliency Hub. You can register for free here.

AWS re:Invent recaps in your area. During the re:Invent week, we had lots of new announcements, and in the next weeks you can find in your area a recap of all these launches. All the events will be posted on this site, so check it regularly to find an event nearby.

AWS re:Invent keynotes, leadership sessions, and breakout sessions are available on demand. I recommend that you check the playlists and find the talks about your favorite topics in one collection.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Week in Review!

— Marcia

New for Amazon SageMaker – Perform Shadow Tests to Compare Inference Performance Between ML Model Variants

Post Syndicated from Antje Barth original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-for-amazon-sagemaker-perform-shadow-tests-to-compare-inference-performance-between-ml-model-variants/

As you move your machine learning (ML) workloads into production, you need to continuously monitor your deployed models and iterate when you observe a deviation in your model performance. When you build a new model, you typically start validating the model offline using historical inference request data. But this data sometimes fails to account for current, real-world conditions. For example, new products might become trending that your product recommendation model hasn’t seen yet. Or, you experience a sudden spike in the volume of inference requests in production that you never exposed your model to before.

Today, I’m excited to announce Amazon SageMaker support for shadow testing!

Deploying a model in shadow mode lets you conduct a more holistic test by routing a copy of the live inference requests for a production model to the new (shadow) model. Yet, only the responses from the production model are returned to the calling application. Shadow testing helps you build further confidence in your model and catch potential configuration errors and performance issues before they impact end users. Once you complete a shadow test, you can use the deployment guardrails for SageMaker inference endpoints to safely update your model in production.

Get Started with Amazon SageMaker Shadow Testing
You can create shadow tests using the new SageMaker Inference Console and APIs. Shadow testing gives you a fully managed experience for setup, monitoring, viewing, and acting on the results of shadow tests. If you have existing workflows built around SageMaker endpoints, you can also deploy a model in shadow mode using the existing SageMaker Inference APIs.

On the SageMaker console, select Inference and Shadow tests to create, monitor, and deploy shadow tests.

Amazon SageMaker Shadow Tests

To create a shadow test, select an existing (or create a new) SageMaker endpoint and production variant you want to test against.

Amazon SageMaker - Create Shadow Test

Next, configure the proportion of traffic to send to the shadow variant, the comparison metrics you want to evaluate, and the duration of the test. You can also enable data capture for your production and shadow variant.

Amazon SagMaker - Create Shadow Test

That’s it. SageMaker now automatically deploys the new variant in shadow mode and routes a copy of the inference requests to it in real time, all within the same endpoint. The following diagram illustrates this workflow.

Amazon SageMaker - Shadow Testing

Note that only the responses of the production variant are returned to the calling application. You can choose to either discard or log the responses of the shadow variant for offline comparison.

You can also use shadow testing to validate changes you made to any component in your production variant, including the serving container or ML instance. This can be useful when you’re upgrading to a new framework version of your serving container, applying patches, or if you want to make sure that there is no impact to latency or error rate due to this change. Similarly, if you consider moving to another ML instance type, for example, Amazon EC2 C7g instances based on AWS Graviton processors, or EC2 G5 instances powered by NVIDIA A10G Tensor Core GPUs, you can use shadow testing to evaluate the performance on production traffic prior to rollout.

You can monitor the progress of the shadow test and performance metrics such as latency and error rate through a live dashboard. On the SageMaker console, select Inference and Shadow tests, then select the shadow test you want to monitor.

Amazon SageMaker - Monitor Shadow Test

Amazon SageMaker - Monitor Shadow Test

If you decide to promote the shadow model to production, select Deploy shadow variant and define the infrastructure configuration to deploy the shadow variant.

Amazon SageMaker - Deploy Shadow Variant

Amazon SageMaker - Deploy Shadow Variant

You can also use the SageMaker deployment guardrails if you want to add linear or canary traffic shifting modes and auto rollbacks to your update.

Availability and Pricing
SageMaker support for shadow testing is available today in all AWS Regions where SageMaker hosting is available except for the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions and AWS China Regions.

There is no additional charge for SageMaker shadow testing other than usage charges for the ML instances and ML storage provisioned to host the shadow variant. The pricing for ML instances and ML storage dimensions is the same as the real-time inference option. There is no additional charge for data processed in and out of shadow deployments. The SageMaker pricing page has all the details.

To learn more, visit Amazon SageMaker shadow testing.

Start validating your new ML models with SageMaker shadow tests today!

— Antje

Next Generation SageMaker Notebooks – Now with Built-in Data Preparation, Real-Time Collaboration, and Notebook Automation

Post Syndicated from Antje Barth original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/next-generation-sagemaker-notebooks-now-with-built-in-data-preparation-real-time-collaboration-and-notebook-automation/

In 2019, we introduced Amazon SageMaker Studio, the first fully integrated development environment (IDE) for data science and machine learning (ML). SageMaker Studio gives you access to fully managed Jupyter Notebooks that integrate with purpose-built tools to perform all ML steps, from preparing data to training and debugging models, tracking experiments, deploying and monitoring models, and managing pipelines.

Today, I’m excited to announce the next generation of Amazon SageMaker Notebooks to increase efficiency across the ML development workflow. You can now improve data quality in minutes with the built-in data preparation capability, edit the same notebooks with your teams in real time, and automatically convert notebook code to production-ready jobs.

Let me show you what’s new!

New Notebook Capability for Simplified Data Preparation
The new built-in data preparation capability is powered by Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler and is available in SageMaker Studio notebooks.  SageMaker Studio notebooks automatically generate key visualizations on top of Pandas data frames to help you understand data distribution and identify data quality issues, like missing values, invalid data, and outliers. You can also select the target column for ML models and generate ML-specific insights such as imbalanced class or high correlation columns. You then receive recommendations for data transformations to resolve the issues. You can apply the data transformations right in the UI, and SageMaker Studio notebooks automatically generate the corresponding transformation code in the notebook cells that you can use to replay your data preparation pipeline.

Using the Built-in Data Preparation Capability
To get started, pip install and import sagemaker_datawrangler along with the pandas Python package. Then, download the dataset you want to analyze to the notebook working directory, and read the dataset with pandas.

import pandas as pd 
import sagemaker_datawrangler 

!aws s3 cp s3://<YOUR_S3_BUCKET>/data.csv . 

df = pd.read_csv("data.csv")

Now, when you display the data frame, it automatically shows key data visualizations at the top of each column, surfaces data insights, detects data quality issues, and suggests solutions to improve data quality. When you select a column as the target column for ML predictions, you get target-specific insights and warnings, such as mixed data types in target (for regression use cases) or too few instances per class (for classification use cases).

In this example, I’m using the Women’s E-Commerce Clothing Reviews dataset that contains customer reviews and ratings for women’s clothing. This dataset was obtained from Kaggle and has been modified by Amazon to add synthetic data quality issues.

Amazon SageMaker Studio notebooks with built-in data preparation

You can review the suggested data transformations to improve the data quality and apply them right in the UI. For a list of all supported data transformations, have a look at the documentation. Once you apply a data transformation, SageMaker Studio notebooks automatically generate the code to reproduce those data preparation steps in another notebook cell.

For my example, I select Rating as my target column. Target column insights tells me in a high-priority warning that this column has too few instances per class and with a medium-priority warning that classes are too imbalanced. Let’s follow the suggestions and drop rare target values and drop missing values. I will also follow the suggestions for some of the feature columns and drop missing values in the Review Text column and drop the Division Name column.

Once I apply the transformations, the notebook generates this code for me:

# Pandas code generated by sagemaker_datawrangler
output_df = df.copy(deep=True)


# Code to Drop rare target values for column: Rating to resolve warning: Too few instances per class 
rare_target_labels_to_drop = ['-100', '100']
output_df = output_df[~output_df['Rating'].isin(rare_target_labels_to_drop)]


# Code to Drop missing for column: Rating to resolve warning: Missing values 
output_df = output_df[output_df['Rating'].notnull()]


# Code to Drop missing for column: Review Text to resolve warning: Missing values 
output_df = output_df[output_df['Review Text'].notnull()]


# Code to Drop column for column: Division Name to resolve warning: Missing values 
output_df=output_df.drop(columns=['Division Name'])

I can now review and modify the code if needed or start integrating the data transformations as part of my ML development workflow.

Introducing Shared Spaces for Team-Based Sharing and Real-Time Collaboration
SageMaker Studio now offers shared spaces that give data science and ML teams a workspace where they can read, edit, and run notebooks together in real time to streamline collaboration and communication during the development process. Shared spaces provide a shared Amazon EFS directory that you can utilize to share files within a shared space. All taggable SageMaker resources that you create in a shared space are automatically tagged to help you organize and have a filtered view of your ML resources, such as training jobs, experiments, and models, that are relevant to the business problem you work on in the space. This also helps you monitor costs and plan budgets using tools such as AWS Budgets and AWS Cost Explorer.

And that’s not all. You can now also create multiple SageMaker domains within the same AWS account to scope access and isolate resources to different teams or business units in your organization. Now, let me show you how to create a shared space for users within a SageMaker domain.

Using Shared Spaces
You can use the SageMaker console or the AWS CLI to create shared spaces for a SageMaker domain. To get started in the SageMaker console, go to Domains, select or create a new domain, and select Space management on the Domain details page. Then, select Create and give the shared space a name.

Amazon SageMaker Spaces - Create Space

Users in this SageMaker domain can now launch and join the shared space through their SageMaker domain user profiles.

Amazon SageMaker Spaces - Launch Spaces

In a shared space, select the new Collaborators icon in the left navigation menu. You can now see who else is currently active in this space. The following screenshot shows user tom on the left, editing a notebook file. On the right, user antje sees the edits in real time, together with an annotation of the user name that currently edits that notebook cell.

Amazon SageMaker Spaces

New Notebook Capability to Automatically Convert Notebook Code to Production-Ready Jobs
You can now select a notebook and automate it as a job that can run in a production environment without the need to manage the underlying infrastructure. When you create a SageMaker Notebook Job, SageMaker Studio takes a snapshot of the entire notebook, packages its dependencies in a container, builds the infrastructure, runs the notebook as an automated job on a schedule you define, and deprovisions the infrastructure upon job completion. This notebook capability is now also available in SageMaker Studio Lab, our free ML development environment that provides the compute, storage, and security to learn and experiment with ML.

Using the Notebook Capability to Automate Notebooks
To get started, open a notebook file in SageMaker Studio. Then, right-click your notebook file and select Create Notebook Job or select the Create Notebook Job icon, as highlighted in the following screenshot.

Amazon SageMaker Studio - Automate your notebooks

Define a name for the Notebook Job, review the input file location, specify the compute type to use, and whether to run the job immediately or on a schedule. Then, select Create.

Amazon SageMaker Studio - Create Notebook Job

The Notebook Job has been created, and you can review all Notebook Job Definitions in the UI.

Amazon SageMaker Studio - Notebook Job Definitions

Now Available
The new Amazon SageMaker Studio notebook capabilities are now available in all AWS Regions where Amazon SageMaker Studio is available except for the AWS China Regions.

At launch, the built-in data preparation capability powered by SageMaker Data Wrangler is supported for SageMaker Studio notebooks and the following notebook kernel images:

  • Python 3 (Data Science) with Python 3.7
  • Python 3 (Data Science 2.0) with Python 3.8
  • Python 3 (Data Science 3.0) with Python 3.10
  • Spark Analytics 1.0 and 2.0

For more information, visit Amazon SageMaker Notebooks.

Start building your ML projects with the next generation of Amazon SageMaker Notebooks today!

— Antje

AWS Machine Learning University New Educator Enablement Program to Build Diverse Talent for ML/AI Jobs

Post Syndicated from Marcia Villalba original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-machine-learning-university-new-educator-enablement-program-to-build-diverse-talent-for-ml-ai-jobs/

AWS Machine Learning University is now providing a free educator enablement program. This program provides faculty at community colleges, minority-serving institutions (MSIs), and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) with the skills and resources to teach data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) concepts to build a diverse pipeline for in-demand jobs of today and tomorrow.

According to the National Science Foundation, Black and Hispanic or Latino students earn bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science—the dominant pathway to AI/ML—at a much lower rate than their white peers, earning less than 11 percent of computer science degrees awarded. However, research shows that having diverse perspectives among skilled practitioners and across the AI/ML lifecycle contributes to the development of AI/ML systems that are safe, trustworthy, and have less bias. 

In 2018, we announced the Machine Learning University (MLU) to share with all developers the same courses that we used to train engineers at Amazon and AWS. This platform offers self-service, self-paced, AI/ML digital courses.

Machine Learning University home page

And today, we add this new program to our AI/ML training offering. Although anyone could access the MLU self-paced learning, it places the burden on the learner to source prerequisite work and solutions. This educator enablement program takes the concepts and lessons developed by MLU and makes them more accessible to educators. It offers a year-round educator enablement program with lesson planning, course playbooks, and access to free compute resources.

Program Details
Educators are onboarded in small-group cohorts into bootcamps where they will learn the material and deep dive into how to teach it via instructor-led lectures and hands-on projects. Educators who complete the bootcamp can take part in different year-round development opportunities, such as a dedicated Slack channel to share teaching best practices, education topic series and virtual study sessions moderated by MLU instructors, and regional events for continued professional development. Also, they will receive continuing education credits and AWS-provided stipends.

Faculty and students get access to instructional material through Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab. SageMaker Studio Lab was announced last year and is AWS’s free (no credit card required) ML development environment. It provides computing and storage for anybody that wants to learn and experiment with ML. Institutions can unlock additional resources to support their ML programs by registering for AWS Academy. AWS Academy unlocks all the AWS services for a complete AI/ML program.

Community colleges and universities can integrate this educator enablement program into their computer science, information technology, and business curricula to create an AI/ML course, certificate, or degree. We have worked with educators and education boards such as Houston Community College to create content that is vetted for credit-worthy and degree-earning curricula.

In August 2022, we launched our first educator bootcamp in partnership with The Coding School. The bootcamp was delivered over two weeks, offering lectures, case studies, and hands-on projects. 25 educators completed the Educator Machine Learning Bootcamp, representing 22 US community colleges and universities.

Learn More and Join The Program
During 2023, AWS Machine Learning University will run six educator-enablement cohorts starting in January. The program will give priority consideration to educators at community colleges, MSIs, and HBCUs, in alignment with this program mission to increase access to AI/ML technology to historically underserved and underrepresented students.

If you are a computer science educator or part of a board of educators interested in fostering more depth in your computer science coursework, you should sign up for the educator enablement program.

Marcia