Tag Archives: Analytics

Query your Iceberg tables in data lake using Amazon Redshift (Preview)

Post Syndicated from Rohit Bansal original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/query-your-iceberg-tables-in-data-lake-using-amazon-redshift-preview/

Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed petabyte-scale cloud data warehouse that makes it simple and cost-effective to analyze all your data using standard SQL and your existing business intelligence (BI) tools. Tens of thousands of customers today use Amazon Redshift to analyze exabytes of data and run analytical queries, making it the most widely used cloud data warehouse. Amazon Redshift is available in both serverless and provisioned configurations.

Amazon Redshift enables you to directly access data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) using SQL queries and join data across your data warehouse and data lake. With Amazon Redshift, you can query the data in your S3 data lake using a central AWS Glue metastore from your Redshift data warehouse.

Amazon Redshift supports querying a wide variety of data formats, such as CSV, JSON, Parquet, and ORC, and table formats like Apache Hudi and Delta. Amazon Redshift also supports querying nested data with complex data types such as struct, array, and map.

With this capability, Amazon Redshift extends your petabyte-scale data warehouse to an exabyte-scale data lake on Amazon S3 in a cost-effective manner.

Apache Iceberg is the latest table format that is supported now in preview by Amazon Redshift. In this post, we show you how to query Iceberg tables using Amazon Redshift, and explore Iceberg support and options.

Solution overview

Apache Iceberg is an open table format for very large petabyte-scale analytic datasets. Iceberg manages large collections of files as tables, and it supports modern analytical data lake operations such as record-level insert, update, delete, and time travel queries. The Iceberg specification allows seamless table evolution such as schema and partition evolution, and its design is optimized for usage on Amazon S3.

Iceberg stores the metadata pointer for all the metadata files. When a SELECT query is reading an Iceberg table, the query engine first goes to the Iceberg catalog, then retrieves the entry of the location of the latest metadata file, as shown in the following diagram.

Amazon Redshift now provides support for Apache Iceberg tables, which allows data lake customers to run read-only analytics queries in a transactionally consistent way. This enables you to easily manage and maintain your tables on transactional data lakes.

Amazon Redshift supports Apache Iceberg’s native schema and partition evolution capabilities using the AWS Glue Data Catalog, eliminating the need to alter table definitions to add new partitions or to move and process large amounts of data to change the schema of an existing data lake table. Amazon Redshift uses the column statistics stored in the Apache Iceberg table metadata to optimize its query plans and reduce the file scans required to run queries.

In this post, we use the Yellow taxi public dataset from NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission as our source data. The dataset contains data files in Apache Parquet format on Amazon S3. We use Amazon Athena to convert this Parquet dataset and then use Amazon Redshift Spectrum to query and join with a Redshift local table, perform row-level deletes and updates and partition evolution, all coordinated through the AWS Glue Data Catalog in an S3 data lake.

Prerequisites

You should have the following prerequisites:

Convert Parquet data to an Iceberg table

For this post, you need the Yellow taxi public dataset from the NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission available in Iceberg format. You can download the files and then use Athena to convert the Parquet dataset into an Iceberg table, or refer to Build an Apache Iceberg data lake using Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and AWS Glue blog post to create the Iceberg table.

In this post, we use Athena to convert the data. Complete the following steps:

  1. Download the files using the previous link or use the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to copy the files from the public S3 bucket for year 2020 and 2021 to your S3 bucket using the following command:
    aws s3 cp "s3://nyc-tlc/trip data/" s3://<Your S3 bucket name>/Parquet/  --exclude "*"  --include  "yellow_tripdata_2020*" –recursive
    aws s3 cp "s3://nyc-tlc/trip data/" s3://<Your S3 bucket name>/Parquet/  --exclude "*"  --include  "yellow_tripdata_2021*" –recursive

For more information, refer to Setting up the Amazon Redshift CLI.

  1. Create a database Icebergdb and create a table using Athena pointing to the Parquet format files using the following statement:
    CREATE DATABASE Icebergdb; 
    CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE icebergdb.nyc_taxi_yellow_parquet(
    	vendorid int,
    	tpep_pickup_datetime timestamp,
    	tpep_dropoff_datetime timestamp,
    	passenger_count bigint,
    	trip_distance double,
    	ratecodeid bigint,
    	store_and_fwd_flag string,
    	pulocationid int,
    	dolocationid int,
    	payment_type integer,
    	fare_amount double,
    	extra double,
    	mta_tax double,
    	tip_amount double,
    	tolls_amount double,
    	improvement_surcharge double,
    	total_amount double,
    	congestion_surcharge double,
    	airport_fee double
    )
    STORED AS PARQUET
    LOCATION 's3://<Your S3 Bucket>/Parquet/’

  2. Validate the data in the Parquet table using the following SQL:
    SELECT vendorid,
    	tpep_pickup_datetime,
    	tpep_dropoff_datetime,
    	trip_distance,
    	fare_amount,
    	tip_amount,
    	tolls_amount,
    	total_amount,
    	congestion_surcharge,
    	airport_fee
    FROM icebergdb.nyc_taxi_yellow_parquet
    limit 5;

  3. Create an Iceberg table in Athena with the following code. You can see the table type properties as an Iceberg table with Parquet format and snappy compression in the following create table statement. You need to update the S3 location before running the SQL. Also note that the Iceberg table is partitioned with the Year key.
    CREATE  TABLE nyc_taxi_yellow_iceberg(
      vendorid int, 
      tpep_pickup_datetime timestamp, 
      tpep_dropoff_datetime timestamp, 
      passenger_count bigint, 
      trip_distance double, 
      ratecodeid bigint, 
      store_and_fwd_flag string, 
      pulocationid int, 
      dolocationid int, 
      payment_type bigint, 
      fare_amount double, 
      extra double, 
      mta_tax double, 
      tip_amount double, 
      tolls_amount double, 
      improvement_surcharge double, 
      total_amount double, 
      congestion_surcharge double, 
      airport_fee double)
    PARTITIONED BY (year(tpep_pickup_datetime))
    LOCATION ‘s3://<Your S3 bucket name>/iceberg/iceberg'
    TBLPROPERTIES (
      'table_type'='iceberg',
      'write_compression'='snappy',
      'format'='parquet');

  4. After you create the table, load the data into the Iceberg table using the previously loaded Parquet table nyc_taxi_yellow_parquet with the following SQL:
    insert into nyc_taxi_yellow_iceberg (
    	vendorid,tpep_pickup_datetime,
    	tpep_dropoff_datetime,
    	passenger_count,trip_distance,
    	ratecodeid,store_and_fwd_flag,
    	pulocationid,dolocationid,
    	payment_type,fare_amount,
    	extra,mta_tax,tip_amount,
    	tolls_amount,total_amount,
    	congestion_surcharge,airport_fee
    	)
    select vendorid,tpep_pickup_datetime,
    	tpep_dropoff_datetime,
    	passenger_count,trip_distance,
    	ratecodeid,store_and_fwd_flag,
    	pulocationid,dolocationid,
    	payment_type,fare_amount,
    	extra,mta_tax,tip_amount,
    	tolls_amount,total_amount,
    	congestion_surcharge,airport_fee
    from nyc_taxi_yellow_parquet;

  5. When the SQL statement is complete, validate the data in the Iceberg table nyc_taxi_yellow_iceberg. This step is required before moving to the next step.
    SELECT * FROM nyc_taxi_yellow_iceberg LIMIT 5;

  6. You can validate that the nyc_taxi_yellow_iceberg table is in Iceberg format table and partitioned on the Year column using the following command:
    SHOW CREATE TABLE nyc_taxi_yellow_iceberg;

Create an external schema in Amazon Redshift

In this section, we demonstrate how to create an external schema in Amazon Redshift pointing to the AWS Glue database icebergdb to query the Iceberg table nyc_taxi_yellow_iceberg that we saw in the previous section using Athena.

Log in to the Redshift via Query Editor v2 or a SQL client and run the following command (note that the AWS Glue database icebergdb and Region information is being used):

CREATE external schema spectrum_iceberg_schema
from data catalog
database 'icebergdb'
region 'us-east-1'
iam_role default;

To learn about creating external schemas in Amazon Redshift, refer to create external schema

After you create the external schema spectrum_iceberg_schema, you can query the Iceberg table in Amazon Redshift.

Query the Iceberg table in Amazon Redshift

Run the following query in Query Editor v2. Note that spectrum_iceberg_schema is the name of the external schema created in Amazon Redshift and nyc_taxi_yellow_iceberg is the table in the AWS Glue database used in the query:

SELECT * FROM"dev"."spectrum_iceberg_schema"."nyc_taxi_yellow_iceberg";

The query data output in the following screenshot shows that the AWS Glue table with Iceberg format is queryable using Redshift Spectrum.

Check the explain plan of querying the Iceberg table

You can use the following query to get the explain plan output, which shows the format is ICEBERG:

EXPLAIN 
SELECT vendorid,count(*) 
FROM "dev"."spectrum_iceberg_schema"."nyc_taxi_yellow_iceberg"
GROUP BY vendorid; 

Validate updates for data consistency

After the update is complete on the Iceberg table, you can query Amazon Redshift to see the transactionally consistent view of the data. Let’s run a query by picking a vendorid and for a certain pick-up and drop-off:

SELECT * FROM nyc_taxi_yellow_iceberg
WHERE vendorid=1
AND tpep_pickup_datetime=cast('2021-06-24 21:53:26' AS timestamp)
AND tpep_dropoff_datetime=cast('2021-06-24 22:02:46'AS timestamp)
LIMIT 5;

Next, update the value of passenger_count to 4 and trip_distance to 9.4 for a vendorid and certain pick-up and drop-off dates in Athena:

UPDATE nyc_taxi_yellow_iceberg
SET passenger_count=4,trip_distance=9.4
WHERE vendorid=1
AND tpep_pickup_datetime=cast('2021-06-24 21:53:26' AS timestamp)
AND tpep_dropoff_datetime=cast('2021-06-24 22:02:46'AS timestamp);

Finally, run the following query in Query Editor v2 to see the updated value of passenger_count and trip_distance:

SELECT * 
FROM "dev"."spectrum_iceberg_schema"."nyc_taxi_yellow_iceberg"
WHERE vendorid=1
AND tpep_pickup_datetime=cast('2021-06-24 21:53:26' AS timestamp)
AND tpep_dropoff_datetime=cast('2021-06-24 22:02:46' AS timestamp)
LIMIT 5;

As shown in the following screenshot, the update operations on the Iceberg table are available in Amazon Redshift.

Create a unified view of the local table and historical data in Amazon Redshift

As a modern data architecture strategy, you can organize historical data or less frequently accessed data in the data lake and keep frequently accessed data in the Redshift data warehouse. This provides the flexibility to manage analytics at scale and find the most cost-effective architecture solution.

In this example, we load 2 years of data in a Redshift table; the rest of the data stays on the S3 data lake because that dataset is less frequently queried.

  1. Use the following code to load 2 years of data in the nyc_taxi_yellow_recent table in Amazon Redshift, sourcing from the Iceberg table:
    CREATE TABLE nyc_taxi_yellow_recent
    AS
    SELECT *
    FROM "dev"."spectrum_iceberg_schema"."nyc_taxi_yellow_iceberg"
    WHERE extract(year from tpep_pickup_datetime)>2020;

  2. Next, you can remove the last 2 years of data from the Iceberg table using the following command in Athena because you loaded the data into a Redshift table in the previous step:
    DELETE FROM nyc_taxi_yellow_iceberg 
    WHERE EXTRACT(year from tpep_pickup_datetime)>2020;

After you complete these steps, the Redshift table has 2 years of the data and the rest of the data is in the Iceberg table in Amazon S3.

  1. Create a view using the nyc_taxi_yellow_iceberg Iceberg table and nyc_taxi_yellow_recent table in Amazon Redshift:
    create or replace view nyc_taxi_yellow as
    select 'nyc_taxi_yellow_iceberg' as source,vendorid,tpep_pickup_datetime,
        tpep_dropoff_datetime,
        passenger_count,trip_distance,
        ratecodeid,store_and_fwd_flag,
        pulocationid,dolocationid,
        payment_type,fare_amount,
        extra,mta_tax,tip_amount,
        tolls_amount,total_amount,
        congestion_surcharge,airport_fee
    from "dev"."spectrum_iceberg_schema"."nyc_taxi_yellow_iceberg"
    union all
    select 'nyc_taxi_yellow_recent' as source,vendorid,tpep_pickup_datetime,
        tpep_dropoff_datetime,
        passenger_count,trip_distance,
        ratecodeid,store_and_fwd_flag,
        pulocationid,dolocationid,
        payment_type,fare_amount,
        extra,mta_tax,tip_amount,
        tolls_amount,total_amount,
        congestion_surcharge,airport_fee
    from  public.nyc_taxi_yellow_recent
    with no schema binding;

  2. Now query the view, depending on the filter conditions, Redshift Spectrum will scan either the Iceberg data, the Redshift table, or both. The following example query returns a number of records from each of the source tables by scanning both tables:
    SELECT source,count(1)
    FROM  nyc_taxi_yellow
    GROUP BY source;

Partition evolution

Iceberg uses hidden partitioning, which means you don’t need to manually add partitions for your Apache Iceberg tables. New partition values or new partition specs (add or remove partition columns) in Apache Iceberg tables are automatically detected by Amazon Redshift and no manual operation is needed to update partitions in the table definition. The following example demonstrates this.

In our example, if the Iceberg table nyc_taxi_yellow_iceberg was originally partitioned by year and later the column vendorid was added as an additional partition column, then Amazon Redshift can seamlessly query the Iceberg table nyc_taxi_yellow_iceberg with two different partition schemes over a period of time.

Considerations when querying Iceberg tables using Amazon Redshift

During the preview period, consider the following when using Amazon Redshift with Iceberg tables:

  • Only Iceberg tables defined in the AWS Glue Data Catalog are supported.
  • CREATE or ALTER external table commands are not supported, which means the Iceberg table should already exist in an AWS Glue database.
  • Time travel queries are not supported.
  • Iceberg versions 1 and 2 are supported. For more details on Iceberg format versions, refer to Format Versioning.
  • For a list of supported data types with Iceberg tables, refer to Supported data types with Apache Iceberg tables (preview).
  • Pricing for querying an Iceberg table is the same as accessing any other data formats using Amazon Redshift.

For additional details on considerations for Iceberg format tables preview, refer to Using Apache Iceberg tables with Amazon Redshift (preview).

Customer feedback

“Tinuiti, the largest independent performance marketing firm, handles large volumes of data on a daily basis and must have a robust data lake and data warehouse strategy for our market intelligence teams to store and analyze all our customer data in an easy, affordable, secure, and robust way,” says Justin Manus, Chief Technology Officer at Tinuiti. “Amazon Redshift’s support for Apache Iceberg tables in our data lake, which is the single source of truth, addresses a critical challenge in optimizing performance and accessibility and further simplifies our data integration pipelines to access all the data ingested from different sources and to power our customers’ brand potential.”

Conclusion

In this post, we showed you an example of querying an Iceberg table in Redshift using files stored in Amazon S3, cataloged as a table in the AWS Glue Data Catalog, and demonstrated some of the key features like efficient row-level update and delete, and the schema evolution experience for users to unlock the power of big data using Athena.

You can use Amazon Redshift to run queries on data lake tables in various files and table formats, such as Apache Hudi and Delta Lake, and now with Apache Iceberg (preview), which provides additional options for your modern data architectures needs.

We hope this gives you a great starting point for querying Iceberg tables in Amazon Redshift.


About the Authors

Rohit Bansal is an Analytics Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. He specializes in Amazon Redshift and works with customers to build next-generation analytics solutions using other AWS Analytics services.

Satish Sathiya is a Senior Product Engineer at Amazon Redshift. He is an avid big data enthusiast who collaborates with customers around the globe to achieve success and meet their data warehousing and data lake architecture needs.

Ranjan Burman is an Analytics Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. He specializes in Amazon Redshift and helps customers build scalable analytical solutions. He has more than 16 years of experience in different database and data warehousing technologies. He is passionate about automating and solving customer problems with cloud solutions.

Deploy Amazon OpenSearch Serverless with Terraform

Post Syndicated from Joshua Luo original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/deploy-amazon-opensearch-serverless-with-terraform/

Amazon OpenSearch Serverless provides the search and analytical functionality of OpenSearch without the manual overhead of configuring, managing, and scaling OpenSearch clusters. It automatically scales the resources based on your workload, and you only pay for the resources consumed. Managing OpenSearch Serverless is simple, but with infrastructure as code (IaC) software like Terraform, you can simplify your resource management even more.

This post demonstrates how to use Terraform to create, deploy, and clean up OpenSearch Serverless infrastructure.

Solution overview

To create and deploy an OpenSearch Serverless collection with security and access policies using Terraform, you need to follow these steps:

  1. Initialize the Terraform configuration.
  2. Create an encryption policy.
  3. Create an OpenSearch Serverless collection.
  4. Create a network policy.
  5. Create a virtual private cloud (VPC) endpoint.
  6. Create a data access policy.
  7. Deploy using Terraform.

Prerequisites

This post assumes that you’re familiar with GitHub and Git commands.

For this walkthrough, you need the following:

Initialize the Terraform configuration

The sample code is available in the Terraform GitHub repo in the terraform-provider-aws/examples/opensearchserverless directory. This configuration will get you started with OpenSearch Serverless. First, clone the repository to your workstation and navigate to the directory:

$ git clone https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-aws.git && \ 
cd ./terraform-provider-aws/examples/opensearchserverless

Initialize the configuration to install the aws provider by running the following command:

$ terraform init

The Terraform configuration first defines the version of Terraform required and configures the AWS provider to launch resources in the Region defined by the aws_region variable:

# Require Terraform 0.12 or greater
terraform {
  required_version = ">= 0.12"
}

# Set AWS provider region
provider "aws" {
  region = var.aws_region
}

The variables used in this Terraform configuration are defined in the variables.tf file. This post assumes the default values are used:

variable "aws_region" {
  description = "The AWS region to create things in."
  default     = "us-east-1"
}

variable "collection_name" {
  description = "Name of the OpenSearch Serverless collection."
  default     = "example-collection"
}

Create an encryption policy

Now that the provider is installed and configured, the Terraform configuration moves on to defining OpenSearch Serverless policies for security. OpenSearch Serverless uses AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) to encrypt your data. The encryption is managed by an encryption policy. To create an encryption policy, use the aws_opensearchserverless_security_policy resource, which has a name parameter, a type of encryption, a JSON string that defines the policy, and an optional description:

# Creates an encryption security policy
resource "aws_opensearchserverless_security_policy" "encryption_policy" {
  name        = "example-encryption-policy"
  type        = "encryption"
  description = "encryption policy for ${var.collection_name}"
  policy = jsonencode({
    Rules = [
      {
        Resource = [
          "collection/${var.collection_name}"
        ],
        ResourceType = "collection"
      }
    ],
    AWSOwnedKey = true
  })
}

This encryption policy is named example-encryption-policy, applies to a collection named example-collection, and uses an AWS owned key to encrypt the data.

Create an OpenSearch Serverless collection

You can organize your OpenSearch indexes into a logical grouping called a collection. Create a collection using the aws_opensearchserverless_collection resource, which has a name parameter, and optionally, description, tags, and type:

# Creates a collection
resource "aws_opensearchserverless_collection" "collection" {
  name = var.collection_name

  depends_on = [aws_opensearchserverless_security_policy.encryption_policy]
}

This collection is named example-collection. If type is not specified, a time series collection is created. Supported collection types can be found in the Terraform documentation for the aws_opensearchserverless_collection resource. OpenSearch Serverless requires encryption at rest, so an applicable encryption policy is required before a collection can be created. The Terraform configuration explicitly defines this dependency using the depends_on meta-argument. Errors can arise if this dependency is not defined.

Now that a collection has been created with an AWS owned KMS key, the Terraform configuration goes on to define the network and data access policy to configure access to the collection.

Create a network policy

A network policy allows access to your collection either over the public internet or through OpenSearch Serverless-managed VPC endpoints. Similar to the encryption policy, to create a network policy, use the aws_opensearchserverless_security_policy resource, which has a name parameter, a type of network, a JSON string that defines the policy, and an optional description:

# Creates a network security policy
resource "aws_opensearchserverless_security_policy" "network_policy" {
  name        = "example-network-policy"
  type        = "network"
  description = "public access for dashboard, VPC access for collection endpoint"
  policy = jsonencode([
    {
      Description = "VPC access for collection endpoint",
      Rules = [
        {
          ResourceType = "collection",
          Resource = [
            "collection/${var.collection_name}"
          ]
        }
      ],
      AllowFromPublic = false,
      SourceVPCEs = [
        aws_opensearchserverless_vpc_endpoint.vpc_endpoint.id
      ]
    },
    {
      Description = "Public access for dashboards",
      Rules = [
        {
          ResourceType = "dashboard"
          Resource = [
            "collection/${var.collection_name}"
          ]
        }
      ],
      AllowFromPublic = true
    }
  ])
}

This network policy is named example-network-policy and applies to the collection named example-collection. This policy only allows access to the collection’s OpenSearch endpoint through a VPC endpoint, but allows public access to the OpenSearch Dashboards endpoint.

You’ll notice the VPC endpoint has not been defined yet, but it is referenced in the network policy. Terraform determines this dependency automatically and will not create the network policy until the VPC endpoint has been created.

Create a VPC endpoint

A VPC endpoint enables you to privately access your OpenSearch Serverless collection using AWS PrivateLink (for more information, refer to Access AWS services through AWS PrivateLink). Create a VPC endpoint using the aws_opensearchserverless_vpc_endpoint resource, where you define name, vpc_id, subnet_ids , and optionally, security_group_ids:

# Creates a VPC endpoint
resource "aws_opensearchserverless_vpc_endpoint" "vpc_endpoint" {
  name               = "example-vpc-endpoint"
  vpc_id             = aws_vpc.vpc.id
  subnet_ids         = [aws_subnet.subnet.id]
  security_group_ids = [aws_security_group.security_group.id]
}

Creating a VPC and all the required networking resources is out of scope for this post, but the minimum required VPC resources are created here in a separate file to demonstrate the VPC endpoint functionality. Refer to Getting Started with Amazon VPC to learn more.

Create a data access policy

The configuration defines a data source that looks up information about the context Terraform is currently running in. This data source is used when defining the data access policy. More information can be found in the Terraform documentation for aws_caller_identity.

# Gets access to the effective Account ID in which Terraform is authorized
data "aws_caller_identity" "current" {}

A data access policy allows you to define who has access to collections and indexes. The data access policy is defined using the aws_opensearchserverless_access_policy resource, which has a name parameter, a type parameter set to data, a JSON string that defines the policy, and an optional description:

# Creates a data access policy
resource "aws_opensearchserverless_access_policy" "data_access_policy" {
  name        = "example-data-access-policy"
  type        = "data"
  description = "allow index and collection access"
  policy = jsonencode([
    {
      Rules = [
        {
          ResourceType = "index",
          Resource = [
            "index/${var.collection_name}/*"
          ],
          Permission = [
            "aoss:*"
          ]
        },
        {
          ResourceType = "collection",
          Resource = [
            "collection/${var.collection_name}"
          ],
          Permission = [
            "aoss:*"
          ]
        }
      ],
      Principal = [
        data.aws_caller_identity.current.arn
      ]
    }
  ])
}

This data access policy allows the current AWS role or user to perform collection-related actions on the collection named example-collection and index-related actions on the indexes in the collection.

Deploy using Terraform

Now that you have configured the necessary resources, apply the configuration using terraform apply. Before creating the resources, Terraform will describe all the resources that will be created so you can verify your configuration:

$ terraform apply

...

Terraform used the selected providers to generate the following execution plan. Resource actions are indicated with the following symbols:
  + create

Terraform will perform the following actions:

...

Plan: 13 to add, 0 to change, 0 to destroy.

Changes to Outputs:
  + collection_enpdoint = (known after apply)
  + dashboard_endpoint  = (known after apply)

Do you want to perform these actions?
  Terraform will perform the actions described above.
  Only 'yes' will be accepted to approve.

  Enter a value:

Answer yes to proceed.

If this is the first OpenSearch Serverless collection in your account, applying the configuration may take over 10 minutes because Terraform waits for the collection to become active.

Apply complete! Resources: 13 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed.

Outputs:

collection_enpdoint = "..."
dashboard_endpoint = "..."

You have now deployed an OpenSearch Serverless time series collection with policies to configure encryption and access to the collection!

Clean up

The resources will incur costs as long as they are running, so clean up the resources when you are done using them. Use the terraform destroy command to do this:

$ terraform destroy

...

Terraform used the selected providers to generate the following execution plan. Resource actions are indicated with the following symbols:
  - destroy

Terraform will perform the following actions:

  ...

Plan: 0 to add, 0 to change, 13 to destroy.

Changes to Outputs:

...

Do you really want to destroy all resources?
  Terraform will destroy all your managed infrastructure, as shown above.
  There is no undo. Only 'yes' will be accepted to confirm.

  Enter a value:

Answer yes to run this plan and destroy the infrastructure.

Destroy complete! Resources: 13 destroyed.

All resources created during this walkthrough have now been deleted.

Conclusion

In this post, you created an OpenSearch Serverless collection. Using IaC software like Terraform can make it simple to manage your resources like OpenSearch Serverless collections, encryption, network, and data access policies, and VPC endpoints.

Thank you to all the open-source contributors who help maintain OpenSearch and Terraform.

Try using OpenSearch Serverless with Terraform to simplify your resource management. Check out the Getting started with Amazon OpenSearch Serverless workshop and the Amazon OpenSearch Serverless Developer Guide to learn more about OpenSearch Serverless.


About the authors

Joshua Luo is a Software Development Engineer for Amazon OpenSearch Serverless. He works on the systems that enable customers to manage and monitor their OpenSearch Serverless resources. He enjoys bouldering, photography, and videography in his free time.

Satish Nandi is a Senior Technical Product Manager for Amazon OpenSearch Service.

Build an ETL process for Amazon Redshift using Amazon S3 Event Notifications and AWS Step Functions

Post Syndicated from Ziad Wali original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/build-an-etl-process-for-amazon-redshift-using-amazon-s3-event-notifications-and-aws-step-functions/

Data warehousing provides a business with several benefits such as advanced business intelligence and data consistency. It plays a big role within an organization by helping to make the right strategic decision at the right moment which could have a huge impact in a competitive market. One of the major and essential parts in a data warehouse is the extract, transform, and load (ETL) process which extracts the data from different sources, applies business rules and aggregations and then makes the transformed data available for the business users.

This process is always evolving to reflect new business and technical requirements, especially when working in an ambitious market. Nowadays, more verification steps are applied to source data before processing them which so often add an administration overhead. Hence, automatic notifications are more often required in order to accelerate data ingestion, facilitate monitoring and provide accurate tracking about the process.

Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed, cloud data warehouse that allows you to process and run your complex SQL analytics workloads on structured and semi-structured data. It also helps you to securely access your data in operational databases, data lakes or third-party datasets with minimal movement or copying. AWS Step Functions is a fully managed service that gives you the ability to orchestrate and coordinate service components. Amazon S3 Event Notifications is an Amazon S3 feature that you can enable in order to receive notifications when specific events occur in your S3 bucket.

In this post we discuss how we can build and orchestrate in a few steps an ETL process for Amazon Redshift using Amazon S3 Event Notifications for automatic verification of source data upon arrival and notification in specific cases. And we show how to use AWS Step Functions for the orchestration of the data pipeline. It can be considered as a starting point for teams within organizations willing to create and build an event driven data pipeline from data source to data warehouse that will help in tracking each phase and in responding to failures quickly. Alternatively, you can also use Amazon Redshift auto-copy from Amazon S3 to simplify data loading from Amazon S3 into Amazon Redshift.

Solution overview

The workflow is composed of the following steps:

  1. A Lambda function is triggered by an S3 event whenever a source file arrives at the S3 bucket. It does the necessary verifications and then classifies the file before processing by sending it to the appropriate Amazon S3 prefix (accepted or rejected).
  2. There are two possibilities:
    • If the file is moved to the rejected Amazon S3 prefix, an Amazon S3 event sends a message to Amazon SNS for further notification.
    • If the file is moved to the accepted Amazon S3 prefix, an Amazon S3 event is triggered and sends a message with the file path to Amazon SQS.
  3. An Amazon EventBridge scheduled event triggers the AWS Step Functions workflow.
  4. The workflow executes a Lambda function that pulls out the messages from the Amazon SQS queue and generates a manifest file for the COPY command.
  5. Once the manifest file is generated, the workflow starts the ETL process using stored procedure.

The following image shows the workflow.

Prerequisites

Before configuring the previous solution, you can use the following AWS CloudFormation template to set up and create the infrastructure

  • Give the stack a name, select a deployment VPC and define the master user for the Amazon Redshift cluster by filling in the two parameters MasterUserName and MasterUserPassword.

The template will create the following services:

  • An S3 bucket
  • An Amazon Redshift cluster composed of two ra3.xlplus nodes
  • An empty AWS Step Functions workflow
  • An Amazon SQS queue
  • An Amazon SNS topic
  • An Amazon EventBridge scheduled rule with a 5-minute rate
  • Two empty AWS Lambda functions
  • IAM roles and policies for the services to communicate with each other

The names of the created services are usually prefixed by the stack’s name or the word blogdemo. You can find the names of the created services in the stack’s resources tab.

Step 1: Configure Amazon S3 Event Notifications

Create the following four folders in the S3 bucket:

  • received
  • rejected
  • accepted
  • manifest

In this scenario, we will create the following three Amazon S3 event notifications:

  1. Trigger an AWS Lambda function on the received folder.
  2. Send a message to the Amazon SNS topic on the rejected folder.
  3. Send a message to Amazon SQS on the accepted folder.

To create an Amazon S3 event notification:

  1. Go to the bucket’s Properties tab.
  2. In the Event Notifications section, select Create Event Notification.
  3. Fill in the necessary properties:
    • Give the event a name.
    • Specify the appropriate prefix or folder (accepted/, rejected/ or received/).
    • Select All object create events as an event type.
    • Select and choose the destination (AWS lambda, Amazon SNS or Amazon SQS).
      Note: for an AWS Lambda destination, choose the function that starts with ${stackname}-blogdemoVerify_%

At the end, you should have three Amazon S3 events:

  • An event for the received prefix with an AWS Lambda function as a destination type.
  • An event for the accepted prefix with an Amazon SQS queue as a destination type.
  • An event for the rejected prefix with an Amazon SNS topic as a destination type.

The following image shows what you should have after creating the three Amazon S3 events:

Step 2: Create objects in Amazon Redshift

Connect to the Amazon Redshift cluster and create the following objects:

  1. Three schemas:
    create schema blogdemo_staging; -- for staging tables
    create schema blogdemo_core; -- for target tables
    create schema blogdemo_proc; -- for stored procedures

  2. A table in the blogdemo_staging and blogdemo_core schemas:
    create table ${schemaname}.rideshare
    (
      id_ride bigint not null,
      date_ride timestamp not null,
      country varchar (20),
      city varchar (20),
      distance_km smallint,
      price decimal (5,2),
      feedback varchar (10)
    ) distkey(id_ride);

  3. A stored procedure to extract and load data into the target schema:
    create or replace procedure blogdemo_proc.elt_rideshare (bucketname in varchar(200),manifestfile in varchar (500))
    as $$
    begin
    -- purge staging table
    truncate blogdemo_staging.rideshare;
    
    -- copy data from s3 bucket to staging schema
    execute 'copy blogdemo_staging.rideshare from ''s3://' + bucketname + '/' + manifestfile + ''' iam_role default delimiter ''|'' manifest;';
    
    -- apply transformation rules here
    
    -- insert data into target table
    insert into blogdemo_core.rideshare
    select * from blogdemo_staging.rideshare;
    
    end;
    $$ language plpgsql;

  4. Set the role ${stackname}-blogdemoRoleRedshift_% as a default role:
    1. In the Amazon Redshift console, go to clusters and click on the cluster blogdemoRedshift%.
    2. Go to the Properties tab.
    3. In the Cluster permissions section, select the role ${stackname}-blogdemoRoleRedshift%.
    4. Click on Set default then Make default.

Step 3: Configure Amazon SQS queue

The Amazon SQS queue can be used as it is; this means with the default values. The only thing you need to do for this demo is to go to the created queue ${stackname}-blogdemoSQS% and purge the test messages generated (if any) by the Amazon S3 event configuration. Copy its URL in a text file for further use (more precisely, in one of the AWS Lambda functions).

Step 4: Setup Amazon SNS topic

  1. In the Amazon SNS console, go to the topic ${stackname}-blogdemoSNS%
  2. Click on the Create subscription button.
  3. Choose the blogdemo topic ARN, email protocol, type your email and then click on Create subscription.
  4. Confirm your subscription in your email that you received.

Step 5: Customize the AWS Lambda functions

  1. The following code verifies the name of a file. If it respects the naming convention, it will move it to the accepted folder. If it does not respect the naming convention, it will move it to the rejected one. Copy it to the AWS Lambda function ${stackname}-blogdemoLambdaVerify and then deploy it:
    import boto3
    import re
    
    def lambda_handler (event, context):
        objectname = event['Records'][0]['s3']['object']['key']
        bucketname = event['Records'][0]['s3']['bucket']['name']
        
        result = re.match('received/rideshare_data_20[0-5][0-9]((0[1-9])|(1[0-2]))([0-2][1-9]|3[0-1])\.csv',objectname)
        targetfolder = ''
        
        if result: targetfolder = 'accepted'
        else: targetfolder = 'rejected'
        
        s3 = boto3.resource('s3')
        copy_source = {
            'Bucket': bucketname,
            'Key': objectname
        }
        target_objectname=objectname.replace('received',targetfolder)
        s3.meta.client.copy(copy_source, bucketname, target_objectname)
        
        s3.Object(bucketname,objectname).delete()
        
        return {'Result': targetfolder}

  2. The second AWS Lambda function ${stackname}-blogdemonLambdaGenerate% retrieves the messages from the Amazon SQS queue and generates and stores a manifest file in the S3 bucket manifest folder. Copy the following content, replace the variable ${sqs_url} by the value retrieved in Step 3 and then click on Deploy.
    import boto3
    import json
    import datetime
    
    def lambda_handler(event, context):
    
        sqs_client = boto3.client('sqs')
        queue_url='${sqs_url}'
        bucketname=''
        keypath='none'
        
        manifest_content='{\n\t"entries": ['
        
        while True:
            response = sqs_client.receive_message(
                QueueUrl=queue_url,
                AttributeNames=['All'],
                MaxNumberOfMessages=1
            )
            try:
                message = response['Messages'][0]
            except KeyError:
                break
            
            message_body=message['Body']
            message_data = json.loads(message_body)
            
            objectname = message_data['Records'][0]['s3']['object']['key']
            bucketname = message_data['Records'][0]['s3']['bucket']['name']
    
            manifest_content = manifest_content + '\n\t\t{"url":"s3://' +bucketname + '/' + objectname + '","mandatory":true},'
            receipt_handle = message['ReceiptHandle']
    
            sqs_client.delete_message(
                QueueUrl=queue_url,
                ReceiptHandle=receipt_handle
            )
            
        if bucketname != '':
            manifest_content=manifest_content[:-1]+'\n\t]\n}'
            s3 = boto3.resource("s3")
            encoded_manifest_content=manifest_content.encode('utf-8')
            current_datetime=datetime.datetime.now()
            keypath='manifest/files_list_'+current_datetime.strftime("%Y%m%d-%H%M%S")+'.manifest'
            s3.Bucket(bucketname).put_object(Key=keypath, Body=encoded_manifest_content)
    
        sf_tasktoken = event['TaskToken']
        
        step_function_client = boto3.client('stepfunctions')
        step_function_client.send_task_success(taskToken=sf_tasktoken,output='{"manifestfilepath":"' + keypath + '",\"bucketname":"' + bucketname +'"}')

Step 6: Add tasks to the AWS Step Functions workflow

Create the following workflow in the state machine ${stackname}-blogdemoStepFunctions%.

If you would like to accelerate this step, you can drag and drop the content of the following JSON file in the definition part when you click on Edit. Make sure to replace the three variables:

  • ${GenerateManifestFileFunctionName} by the ${stackname}-blogdemoLambdaGenerate% arn.
  • ${RedshiftClusterIdentifier} by the Amazon Redshift cluster identifier.
  • ${MasterUserName} by the username that you defined while deploying the CloudFormation template.

Step 7: Enable Amazon EventBridge rule

Enable the rule and add the AWS Step Functions workflow as a rule target:

  1. Go to the Amazon EventBridge console.
  2. Select the rule created by the Amazon CloudFormation template and click on Edit.
  3. Enable the rule and click Next.
  4. You can change the rate if you want. Then select Next.
  5. Add the AWS Step Functions state machine created by the CloudFormation template blogdemoStepFunctions% as a target and use an existing role created by the CloudFormation template ${stackname}-blogdemoRoleEventBridge%
  6. Click on Next and then Update rule.

Test the solution

In order to test the solution, the only thing you should do is upload some csv files in the received prefix of the S3 bucket. Here are some sample data; each file contains 1000 rows of rideshare data.

If you upload them in one click, you should receive an email because the ridesharedata2022.csv does not respect the naming convention. The other three files will be loaded in the target table blogdemo_core.rideshare. You can check the Step Functions workflow to verify that the process finished successfully.

Clean up

  1. Go to the Amazon EventBridge console and delete the rule ${stackname}-blogdemoevenbridge%.
  2. In the Amazon S3 console, select the bucket created by the CloudFormation template ${stackname}-blogdemobucket% and click on Empty.
  3. Go to Subscriptions in the Amazon SNS console and delete the subscription created in Step 4.
  4. In the AWS CloudFormation console, select the stack and delete it.

Conclusion

In this post, we showed how different AWS services can be easily implemented together in order to create an event-driven architecture and automate its data pipeline, which targets the cloud data warehouse Amazon Redshift for business intelligence applications and complex queries.


About the Author

Ziad WALI is an Acceleration Lab Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. He has over 10 years of experience in databases and data warehousing where he enjoys building reliable, scalable and efficient solutions. Outside of work, he enjoys sports and spending time in nature.

Announcing Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink Renamed from Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-amazon-managed-service-for-apache-flink-renamed-from-amazon-kinesis-data-analytics/

Today we are announcing the rename of Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics to 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.

We continue to deliver the same experience in your Flink applications without any impact on ongoing operations, developments, or business use cases. All your existing running applications in Kinesis Data Analytics will work as is without any changes.

Many customers use Apache Flink for data processing, including support for diverse use cases with a vibrant open-source community. While Apache Flink applications are robust and popular, they can be difficult to manage because they require scaling and coordination of parallel compute or container resources. With the explosion of data volumes, data types, and data sources, customers need an easier way to access, process, secure, and analyze their data to gain faster and deeper insights without compromising on performance and costs.

Using Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink, you can set up and integrate data sources or destinations with minimal code, process data continuously with sub-second latencies from hundreds of data sources like Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK), and respond to events in real-time. You can also analyze streaming data interactively with notebooks in just a few clicks with Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink Studio with built-in visualizations powered by Apache Zeppelin.

With Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink, you can deploy secure, compliant, and highly available applications. There are no servers and clusters to manage, no compute and storage infrastructure to set up, and you only pay for the resources your applications consume.

A History to Support Apache Flink
Since we launched Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics based on a proprietary SQL engine in 2016, we learned that SQL alone was not sufficient to provide the capabilities that customers needed for efficient stateful stream processing. So, we started investing in Apache Flink, a popular open-source framework and engine for processing real-time data streams.

In 2018, we provided support for Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Java as a programmable option for customers to build streaming applications using Apache Flink libraries and choose their own integrated development environment (IDE) to build their applications. In 2020, we repositioned Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Java to Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink to emphasize our continued support for Apache Flink. In 2021, we launched Kinesis Data Analytics Studio (now, Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink Studio) with a simple, familiar notebook interface for rapid development powered by Apache Zeppelin and using Apache Flink as the processing engine.

Since 2019, we have worked more closely with the Apache Flink community, increasing code contributions in the area of AWS connectors for Apache Flink such as those for Kinesis Data Streams and Kinesis Data Firehose, as well as sponsoring annual Flink Forward events. Recently, we contributed Async Sink to the Flink 1.15 release, which improved cloud interoperability and added more sink connectors and formats, among other updates.

Beyond connectors, we continue to work with the Flink community to contribute availability improvements and deployment options. To learn more, see Making it Easier to Build Connectors with Apache Flink: Introducing the Async Sink in the AWS Open Source Blog.

New Features in Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink
As I mentioned, you can continue to run your existing Flink applications in Kinesis Data Analytics (now Amazon Managed Apache Flink) without making any changes. I want to let you know about a part of the service along with the console change and new feature,  a blueprint where you create an end-to-end data pipeline with just one click.

First, you can use the new console of Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink directly under the Analytics section in AWS. To get started, you can easily create Streaming applications or Studio notebooks in the new console, with the same experience as before.

To create a streaming application in the new console, choose Create from scratch or Use a blueprint. With a new blueprint option, you can create and set up all the resources that you need to get started in a single step using AWS CloudFormation.

The blueprint is a curated collection of Apache Flink applications. The first of these has demo data being read from a Kinesis Data Stream and written to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket.

After creating the demo application, you can configure, run, and open the Apache Flink dashboard to monitor your Flink application’s health with the same experiences as before. You can change a code sample in the GitHub repository to perform different operations using the Flink libraries in your own local development environment.

Blueprints are designed to be extensible, and you can leverage them to create more complex applications to solve your business challenges based on Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink. Learn more about how to use Apache Flink libraries in the AWS documentation.

You can also use a blueprint to create your Studio notebook using Apache Zeppelin as a new setup option. With this new blueprint option, you can also create and set up all the resources that you need to get started in a single step using AWS CloudFormation.

This blueprint includes Apache Flink applications with demo data being sent to an Amazon MSK topic and read in Managed Service for Apache Flink. With an Apache Zeppelin notebook, you can view, query, and analyze your streaming data. Deploying the blueprint and setting up the Studio notebook takes about ten minutes. Go get a cup of coffee while we set it up!

After creating the new Studio notebook, you can open an Apache Zeppelin notebook to run SQL queries in your note with the same experiences as before. You can view a code sample in the GitHub repository to learn more about how to use Apache Flink libraries.

You can run more SQL queries on this demo data such as user-defined functions, tumbling and hopping windows, Top-N queries, and delivering data to an S3 bucket for streaming.

You can also use Java, Python, or Scala to power up your SQL queries and deploy your note as a continuously running application, as shown in the blog posts, how to use the Studio notebook and query your Amazon MSK topics.

To learn more blueprint samples, see GitHub repositories such as reading from MSK Serverless and writing to Amazon S3, reading from MSK Serverless and writing to MSK Serverless, and reading from MSK Serverless and writing to Amazon S3.

Now Available
You can now use Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink, renamed from Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics. All your existing running applications in Kinesis Data Analytics will work as is without any changes.

To learn more, visit the new product page and developer guide. You can send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink, or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy

Monitoring Amazon OpenSearch Serverless using AWS User Notifications

Post Syndicated from Raj Ramasubbu original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/monitoring-amazon-opensearch-serverless-using-aws-user-notifications/

Amazon OpenSearch Serverless is a serverless deployment option for Amazon OpenSearch Service that makes it simple for you to run search and analytics workloads without having to think about infrastructure management. The compute capacity used for data ingestion, and search and query in OpenSearch Serverless is measured in OpenSearch Compute Units (OCUs). Customers can configure maximum OCU limits in their AWS account to control costs. In the past, customers had to monitor resource usage metrics to make sure that the collections did not deplete their configured storage and computational capacity. With the new AWS User Notification integration, you can configure the system to send notifications whenever the capacity threshold is breached. The User Notification feature eliminates the need to monitor the service constantly. AWS User Notifications enables users to centrally set up and view notifications from various AWS services across accounts and regions in a human-friendly format. Users can view notifications in a Console Notifications Center and also configure various delivery channels.

You can now use AWS User Notifications to set up delivery channels to get notified when resource usage is nearing or exceeding the capacity threshold. You receive a notification when an event matches a rule that you specify. There are multiple channels for receiving notifications, including email, AWS Chatbot chat notifications, and AWS Console Mobile Application push notifications. In this post, you will see how you can use AWS user notifications to receive notifications for OCU threshold breaches across all your OpenSearch Serverless collections.

Solution overview

OpenSearch Serverless allows you to receive OCU utilization notifications for both search and indexing in the two scenarios listed below. OCU utilization percent is calculated based on your configured maximum capacity limit and the current OCU consumption.

  • OCU Utilization Approaching Max Limit – OpenSearch Serverless sends this event through AWS User Notifications when current OCU usage percent reaches greater than or equal to 75 percent of the configured maximum OCU capacity.
  • OCU Utilization Reached Max Limit – OpenSearch Serverless sends this event when OCU usage percent reaches 100 percent of the configured maximum OCU capacity.

If you receive OCU utilization notification, you can adjust the maximum capacity limit for your collection using either the console or AWS CLI.

The following sections detail the steps you can take to receive both these OCU utilization notifications for all collections.

Prerequisites

As a prerequisite to receive OCU utilization notifications, you will set up notification configuration in notification hubs to store the notifications data. This has to be done only once, and at least one AWS region should be selected. The following screenshot shows a sample notification hub configuration for the US East (Ohio) AWS Region.

Also, please configure the maximum OCU capacity depending on your requirements for all collections.

Set up OCU utilization notifications

To set up the notifications, complete the following steps:

  1. On the AWS User Notifications console, create a notification configuration to receive notifications about OCU utilization.
  2. Choose Amazon OpenSearch Serverless for the service name and choose OCU Utilization Approaching Max Limit for the event type.
  3. Click Add another event rule and choose OCU Utilization Reached Max Limit for the event type.
  4. Using AWS User Notifications, you can receive the notifications as soon as they occur or receive them within 5 minutes to avoid receiving too many notifications all at once. We recommend receiving notifications every 5 minutes. Choose Receive within 5 minutes (recommended).
  5. You can opt to receive notifications through many delivery channels like the AWS Console Mobile Application and chat channels like Slack. For this blog post, to keep it simple, you can add your email address as the delivery channel, as shown in the following image.
  6. After you complete the configuration, your notification configurations page should look like the following screenshot.
  7. Once the OCU consumption for any of your collections reaches greater than or equal to 75 percent of the configured maximum OCU capacity, you will get a notification to your configured email address within 5 minutes, as shown in the following image.
  8. Once the OCU consumption reaches 100 percent of allocated OCU capacity for any of your collections, you will get a notification to your configured email address within 5 minutes, as shown in the following image.
  9. You can also see notifications in the AWS User Notifications console, as shown in the following screenshots

Summary

You can use AWS User Notifications to get notifications from various AWS services in one place. Now with Amazon OpenSearch Serverless integration, you can receive OCU utilization notifications as well. In this post, we explored how to enable notifications for all Amazon OpenSearch Serverless collections and receive notifications using an email delivery channel. If you have any questions or suggestions, please write to us in the comments section.


About the Author

Raj Ramasubbu is a Senior Analytics Specialist Solutions Architect focused on big data and analytics and AI/ML with Amazon Web Services. He helps customers architect and build highly scalable, performant, and secure cloud-based solutions on AWS. Raj provided technical expertise and leadership in building data engineering, big data analytics, business intelligence, and data science solutions for over 18 years prior to joining AWS. He helped customers in various industry verticals like healthcare, medical devices, life science, retail, asset management, car insurance, residential REIT, agriculture, title insurance, supply chain, document management, and real estate.

Generate machine learning insights for Amazon Security Lake data using Amazon SageMaker

Post Syndicated from Jonathan Nguyen original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/generate-machine-learning-insights-for-amazon-security-lake-data-using-amazon-sagemaker/

Amazon Security Lake automatically centralizes the collection of security-related logs and events from integrated AWS and third-party services. With the increasing amount of security data available, it can be challenging knowing what data to focus on and which tools to use. You can use native AWS services such as Amazon QuickSight, Amazon OpenSearch, and Amazon SageMaker Studio to visualize, analyze, and interactively identify different areas of interest to focus on, and prioritize efforts to increase your AWS security posture.

In this post, we go over how to generate machine learning insights for Security Lake using SageMaker Studio. SageMaker Studio is a web integrated development environment (IDE) for machine learning that provides tools for data scientists to prepare, build, train, and deploy machine learning models. With this solution, you can quickly deploy a base set of Python notebooks focusing on AWS Security Hub findings in Security Lake, which can also be expanded to incorporate other AWS sources or custom data sources in Security Lake. After you’ve run the notebooks, you can use the results to help you identify and focus on areas of interest related to security within your AWS environment. As a result, you might implement additional guardrails or create custom detectors to alert on suspicious activity.

Prerequisites

  1. Specify a delegated administrator account to manage the Security Lake configuration for all member accounts within your organization.
  2. Security Lake has been enabled in the delegated administrator AWS account.
  3. As part of the solution in this post, we focus on Security Hub as a data source. AWS Security Hub must be enabled for your AWS Organizations. When enabling Security Lake, select All log and event sources to include AWS Security Hub findings.
  4. Configure subscriber query access to Security Lake. Security Lake uses AWS Lake Formation cross-account table sharing to support subscriber query access. Accept the resource share request in the subscriber AWS account in AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM). Subscribers with query access can query the data that Security Lake collects. These subscribers query Lake Formation tables in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket with Security Lake data using services such as Amazon Athena.

Solution overview

Figure 1 that follows depicts the architecture of the solution.

Figure 1 SageMaker machine learning insights architecture for Security Lake

Figure 1 SageMaker machine learning insights architecture for Security Lake

The deployment builds the architecture by completing the following steps:

  1. A Security Lake is set up in an AWS account with supported log sources — such as Amazon VPC Flow Logs, AWS Security Hub, AWS CloudTrail, and Amazon Route53 — configured.
  2. Subscriber query access is created from the Security Lake AWS account to a subscriber AWS account.

    Note: See Prerequisite #4 for more information.

  3. The AWS RAM resource share request must be accepted in the subscriber AWS account where this solution is deployed.

    Note: See Prerequisite #4 for more information.

  4. A resource link database in Lake Formation is created in the subscriber AWS account and grants access for the Athena tables in the Security Lake AWS account.
  5. VPC is provisioned for SageMaker with IGW, NAT GW, and VPC endpoints for the AWS services used in the solution. IGW and NAT are required to install external open-source packages.
  6. A SageMaker Domain for SageMaker Studio is created in VPCOnly mode with a single SageMaker user profile that is tied to a dedicated AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role.
  7. A dedicated IAM role is created to restrict access to create and access the presigned URL for the SageMaker Domain from a specific CIDR for accessing the SageMaker notebook.
  8. An AWS CodeCommit repository containing Python notebooks is used for the AI and ML workflow by the SageMaker user-profile.
  9. An Athena workgroup is created for the Security Lake queries with an S3 bucket for output location (access logging configured for the output bucket).

Deploy the solution

You can deploy the SageMaker solution by using either the AWS Management Console or the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK).

Option 1: Deploy the solution with AWS CloudFormation using the console

Use the console to sign in to your subscriber AWS account and then choose the Launch Stack button to open the AWS CloudFormation console pre-loaded with the template for this solution. It takes approximately 10 minutes for the CloudFormation stack to complete.

Select this image to open a link that starts building the CloudFormation stack

Option 2: Deploy the solution by using the AWS CDK

You can find the latest code for the SageMaker solution in the SageMaker machine learning insights GitHub repository, where you can also contribute to the sample code. For instructions and more information on using the AWS CDK, see Get Started with AWS CDK.

To deploy the solution by using the AWS CDK

  1. To build the app when navigating to the project’s root folder, use the following commands:
    npm install -g aws-cdk-lib
    npm install

  2. Update IAM_role_assumption_for_sagemaker_presigned_url and security_lake_aws_account default values in source/lib/sagemaker_domain.ts with their respective appropriate values.
  3. Run the following commands in your terminal while authenticated in your subscriber AWS account. Be sure to replace <INSERT_AWS_ACCOUNT> with your account number and replace <INSERT_REGION> with the AWS Region that you want the solution deployed to.
    cdk bootstrap aws://<INSERT_AWS_ACCOUNT>/<INSERT_REGION>
    cdk deploy

Post deployment steps

Now that you’ve deployed the SageMaker solution, you must grant the SageMaker user profile in the subscriber AWS account query access to your Security Lake. You can Grant permission for the SageMaker user profile to Security Lake in Lake Formation in the subscriber AWS account.

Grant permission to the Security Lake database

  1. Copy the SageMaker user-profile Amazon resource name (ARN) arn:aws:iam::<account-id>:role/sagemaker-user-profile-for-security-lake
  2. Go to Lake Formation in the console.
  3. Select the amazon_security_lake_glue_db_us_east_1 database.
  4. From the Actions Dropdown, select Grant.
  5. In Grant Data Permissions, select SAML Users and Groups.
  6. Paste the SageMaker user profile ARN from Step 1.
  7. In Database Permissions, select Describe and then Grant.

Grant permission to Security Lake – Security Hub table

  1. Copy the SageMaker user-profile ARN arn:aws:iam:<account-id>:role/sagemaker-user-profile-for-security-lake
  2. Go to Lake Formation in the console.
  3. Select the amazon_security_lake_glue_db_us_east_1 database.
  4. Choose View Tables.
  5. Select the amazon_security_lake_table_us_east_1_sh_findings_1_0 table.
  6. From Actions Dropdown, select Grant.
  7. In Grant Data Permissions, select SAML Users and Groups.
  8. Paste the SageMaker user-profile ARN from Step 1.
  9. In Table Permissions, select Describe and then Grant.

Launch your SageMaker Studio application

Now that you have granted permissions for a SageMaker user-profile, we can move on to launching the SageMaker application associated to that user-profile.

  1. Navigate to the SageMaker Studio domain in the console.
  2. Select the SageMaker domain security-lake-ml-insights-<account-id>.
  3. Select the SageMaker user profile sagemaker-user-profile-for-security-lake.
  4. Select the Launch drop-down and select Studio
    Figure 2 SageMaker domain user-profile AWS console screen

    Figure 2: SageMaker domain user-profile AWS console screen

Clone Python notebooks

You’ll work primarily in the SageMaker user profile to create a data-science app to work in. As part of the solution deployment, we’ve created Python notebooks in CodeCommit that you will need to clone.

To clone the Python notebooks

  1. Navigate to CloudFormation in the console.
  2. In the Stacks section, select the SageMakerDomainStack.
  3. Select to the Outputs tab/
  4. Copy the value for sagemakernotebookmlinsightsrepositoryURL. (For example: https://git-codecommit.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/v1/repos/sagemaker_ml_insights_repo)
  5. Go back to your SageMaker app.
  6. In Studio, in the left sidebar, choose the Git icon (identified by a diamond with two branches), then choose Clone a Repository.
    Figure 3 SageMaker clone CodeCommit repository

    Figure 3: SageMaker clone CodeCommit repository

  7. Paste the CodeCommit repository link from Step 4 under the Git repository URL (git). After you paste the URL, select Clone “https://git-codecommit.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/v1/repos/sagemaker_ml_insights_repo”, then select Clone.

    NOTE: If you don’t select from the auto-populated drop-down, SageMaker won’t be able to clone the repository.

    Figure 4 SageMaker clone CodeCommit URL

    Figure 4: SageMaker clone CodeCommit URL

Generating machine learning insights using SageMaker Studio

You’ve successfully pulled the base set of Python notebooks into your SageMaker app and they can be accessed at sagemaker_ml_insights_repo/notebooks/tsat/. The notebooks provide you with a starting point for running machine learning analysis using Security Lake data. These notebooks can be expanded to existing native or custom data sources being sent to Security Lake.

Figure 5: SageMaker cloned Python notebooks

Figure 5: SageMaker cloned Python notebooks

Notebook #1 – Environment setup

The 0.0-tsat-environ-setup notebook handles the installation of the required libraries and dependencies needed for the subsequent notebooks within this blog. For our notebooks, we use an open-source Python library called Kats, which is a lightweight, generalizable framework to perform time series analysis.

  1. Select the 0.0-tsat-environ-setup.ipynb notebook for the environment setup.

    Note: If you have already provisioned a kernel, you can skip steps 2 and 3.

  2. In the right-hand corner, select No Kernel
  3. In the Set up notebook environment pop-up, leave the defaults and choose Select.
    Figure 6 SageMaker application environment settings

    Figure 6: SageMaker application environment settings

  4. After the kernel has successfully started, choose the Terminal icon to open the image terminal.
    Figure 7: SageMaker application terminal

    Figure 7: SageMaker application terminal

  5. To install open-source packages from https instead of http, you must update the sources.list file. After the terminal opens, send the following commands:
    cd /etc/apt
    sed -i 's/http:/https:/g' sources.list

  6. Go back to the 0.0-tsat-environ-setup.ipynb notebook and select the Run drop-down and select Run All Cells. Alternatively, you can run each cell independently, but it’s not required. Grab a coffee! This step will take about 10 minutes.

    IMPORTANT: If you complete the installation out of order or update the requirements.txt file, you might not be able to successfully install Kats and you will need to rebuild your environment by using a net-new SageMaker user profile.

  7. After installing all the prerequisites, check the Kats version to determine if it was successfully installed.
    Figure 8: Kats installation verification

    Figure 8: Kats installation verification

  8. Install PyAthena (Python DB API client for Amazon Athena) which is used to query your data in Security Lake.

You’ve successfully set up the SageMaker app environment! You can now load the appropriate dataset and create a time series.

Notebook #2 – Load data

The 0.1-load-data notebook establishes the Athena connection to query data in Security Lake and creates the resulting time series dataset. The time series dataset will be used for subsequent notebooks to identify trends, outliers, and change points.

  1. Select the 0.1-load-data.ipynb notebook.
  2. If you deployed the solution outside of us-east-1, update the con details to the appropriate Region. In this example, we’re focusing on Security Hub data within Security Lake. If you want to change the underlying data source, you can update the TABLE value.
    Figure 9: SageMaker notebook load Security Lake data settings

    Figure 9: SageMaker notebook load Security Lake data settings

  3. In the Query section, there’s an Athena query to pull specific data from Security Hub, this can be expanded as needed to a subset or can include all products within Security Hub. The query below pulls Security Hub information after 01:00:00 1/1/2022 from the products listed in productname.
    Figure 10: SageMaker notebook Athena query

    Figure 10: SageMaker notebook Athena query

  4. After the values have been updated, you can create your time series dataset. For this notebook, we recommend running each cell individually instead of running all cells at once so you can get a bit more familiar with the process. Select the first cell and choose the Run icon.
    Figure 11: SageMaker run Python notebook code

    Figure 11: SageMaker run Python notebook code

  5. Follow the same process as Step 4 for the subsequent cells.

    Note: If you encounter any issues with querying the table, make sure you completed the post-deployment step for Grant permission to Security Lake – Security Hub table.

You’ve successfully loaded your data and created a timeseries! You can now move on to generating machine learning insights from your timeseries.

Notebook #3 – Trend detector

The 1.1-trend-detector.ipynb notebook handles trend detection in your data. Trend represents a directional change in the level of a time series. This directional change can be either upward (increase in level) or downward (decrease in level). Trend detection helps detect a change while ignoring the noise from natural variability. Each environment is different, and trends help us identify where to look more closely to determine why a trend is positive or negative.

  1. Select 1.1-trend-detector.ipynb notebook for trend detection.
  2. Slopes are created to identify the relationship between x (time) and y (counts).
    Figure 12: SageMaker notebook slope view

    Figure 12: SageMaker notebook slope view

  3. If the counts are increasing with time, then it’s considered a positive slope and the reverse is considered a negative slope. A positive slope isn’t necessarily a good thing because in an ideal state we would expect counts of a finding type to come down with time.
    Figure 13: SageMaker notebook trend view

    Figure 13: SageMaker notebook trend view

  4. Now you can plot the top five positive and negative trends to identify the top movers.
    Figure 14: SageMaker notebook trend results view

    Figure 14: SageMaker notebook trend results view

Notebook #4 – Outlier detection

The 1.2-outlier-detection.ipynb notebook handles outlier detection. This notebook does a seasonal decomposition of the input time series, with additive or multiplicative decomposition as specified (default is additive). It uses a residual time series by either removing only trend or both trend and seasonality if the seasonality is strong. The intent is to discover useful, abnormal, and irregular patterns within data sets, allowing you to pinpoint areas of interest.

  1. To start, it detects points in the residual that are over 5 times the inter-quartile range.
  2. Inter-quartile range (IQR) is the difference between the seventy-fifth and twenty-fifth percentiles of residuals or the spread of data within the middle two quartiles of the entire dataset. IQR is useful in detecting the presence of outliers by looking at values that might lie outside of the middle two quartiles.
  3. The IQR multiplier controls the sensitivity of the range and decision of identifying outliers. By using a larger value for the iqr_mult_thresh parameter in OutlierDetector, outliers would be considered data points, while a smaller value would identify data points as outliers.

    Note: If you don’t have enough data, decrease iqr_mult_thresh to a lower value (for example iqr_mult_thresh=3).

    Figure 15: SageMaker notebook outlier setting

    Figure 15: SageMaker notebook outlier setting

  4. Along with outlier detection plots, investigation SQL will be displayed as well, which can help with further investigation of the outliers.

    In the diagram that follows, you can see that there are several outliers in the number of findings, related to failed AWS Firewall Manager policies, which have been identified by the vertical red lines within the line graph. These are outliers because they deviate from the normal behavior and number of findings on a day-to-day basis. When you see outliers, you can look at the resources that might have caused an unusual increase in Firewall Manager policy findings. Depending on the findings, it could be related to an overly permissive or noncompliant security group or a misconfigured AWS WAF rule group.

    Figure 16: SageMaker notebook outlier results view

    Figure 16: SageMaker notebook outlier results view

Notebook #5 – Change point detection

The 1.3-changepoint-detector.ipynb notebook handles the change point detection. Change point detection is a method to detect changes in a time series that persist over time, such as a change in the mean value. To detect a baseline to identify when several changes might have occurred from that point. Change points occur when there’s an increase or decrease to the average number of findings within a data set.

  1. Along with identifying change points within the data set, the investigation SQL is generated to further investigate the specific change point if applicable.

    In the following diagram, you can see there’s a change point decrease after July 27, 2022, with confidence of 99.9 percent. It’s important to note that change points differ from outliers, which are sudden changes in the data set observed. This diagram means there was some change in the environment that resulted in an overall decrease in the number of findings for S3 buckets with block public access being disabled. The change could be the result of an update to the CI/CD pipelines provisioning S3 buckets or automation to enable all S3 buckets to block public access. Conversely, if you saw a change point that resulted in an increase, it could mean that there was a change that resulted in a larger number of S3 buckets with a block public access configuration consistently being disabled.

    Figure 17: SageMaker changepoint detector view

    Figure 17: SageMaker changepoint detector view

By now, you should be familiar with the set up and deployment for SageMaker Studio and how you can use Python notebooks to generate machine learning insights for your Security Lake data. You can take what you’ve learned and start to curate specific datasets and data sources within Security Lake, create a time series, detect trends, and identify outliers and change points. By doing so, you can answer a variety of security-related questions such as:

  • CloudTrail

    Is there a large volume of Amazon S3 download or copy commands to an external resource? Are you seeing a large volume of S3 delete object commands? Is it possible there’s a ransomware event going on?

  • VPC Flow Logs

    Is there an increase in the number of requests from your VPC to external IPs? Is there an increase in the number of requests from your VPC to your on-premises CIDR? Is there a possibility of internal or external data exfiltration occurring?

  • Route53

    Which resources are making DNS requests that they haven’t typically made within the last 30–45 days? When did it start? Is there a potential command and control session occurring on an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance?

It’s important to note that this isn’t a solution to replace Amazon GuardDuty, which uses foundational data sources to detect communication with known malicious domains and IP addresses and identify anomalous behavior, or Amazon Detective, which provides customers with prebuilt data aggregations, summaries, and visualizations to help security teams conduct faster and more effective investigations. One of the main benefits of using Security Lake and SageMaker Studio is the ability to interactively create and tailor machine learning insights specific to your AWS environment and workloads.

Clean up

If you deployed the SageMaker machine learning insights solution by using the Launch Stack button in the AWS Management Console or the CloudFormation template sagemaker_ml_insights_cfn, do the following to clean up:

  1. In the CloudFormation console for the account and Region where you deployed the solution, choose the SageMakerML stack.
  2. Choose the option to Delete the stack.

If you deployed the solution by using the AWS CDK, run the command cdk destroy.

Conclusion

Amazon Security Lake gives you the ability to normalize and centrally store your security data from various log sources to help you analyze, visualize, and correlate appropriate security logs. You can then use this data to increase your overall security posture by implementing additional security guardrails or take appropriate remediation actions within your AWS environment.

In this blog post, you learned how you can use SageMaker to generate machine learning insights for your Security Hub findings in Security Lake. Although the example solution focuses on a single data source within Security Lake, you can expand the notebooks to incorporate other native or custom data sources in Security Lake.

There are many different use-cases for Security Lake that can be tailored to fit your AWS environment. Take a look at this blog post to learn how you can ingest, transform and deliver Security Lake data to Amazon OpenSearch to help your security operations team quickly analyze security data within your AWS environment. In supported Regions, new Security Lake account holders can try the service free for 15 days and gain access to its features.

 
If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, contact AWS Support.

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Jonathan Nguyen

Jonathan Nguyen

Jonathan is a Principal Security Architect at AWS. His background is in AWS security, with a focus on threat detection and incident response. He helps enterprise customers develop a comprehensive AWS security strategy, deploy security solutions at scale, and train customers on AWS security best practices.

Madhunika Reddy Mikkili

Madhunika Reddy Mikkili

Madhunika is a Data and Machine Learning Engineer with the AWS Professional Services Shared Delivery Team. She is passionate about helping customers achieve their goals through the use of data and machine learning insights. Outside of work, she loves traveling and spending time with family and friends.

Generate security insights from Amazon Security Lake data using Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion

Post Syndicated from Muthu Pitchaimani original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/generate-security-insights-from-amazon-security-lake-data-using-amazon-opensearch-ingestion/

Amazon Security Lake centralizes access and management of your security data by aggregating security event logs from AWS environments, other cloud providers, on premise infrastructure, and other software as a service (SaaS) solutions. By converting logs and events using Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework, an open standard for storing security events in a common and shareable format, Security Lake optimizes and normalizes your security data for analysis using your preferred analytics tool.

Amazon OpenSearch Service continues to be a tool of choice by many enterprises for searching and analyzing large volume of security data. In this post, we show you how to ingest and query Amazon Security Lake data with Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion, a serverless, fully managed data collector with configurable ingestion pipelines. Using OpenSearch Ingestion to ingest data into your OpenSearch Service cluster, you can derive insights quicker for time sensitive security investigations. You can respond swiftly to security incidents, helping you protect your business critical data and systems.

Solution overview

The following architecture outlines the flow of data from Security Lake to OpenSearch Service.

The workflow contains the following steps:

  1. Security Lake persists OCSF schema normalized data in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket determined by the administrator.
  2. Security Lake notifies subscribers through the chosen subscription method, in this case Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS).
  3. OpenSearch Ingestion registers as a subscriber to get the necessary context information.
  4. OpenSearch Ingestion reads Parquet formatted security data from the Security Lake managed Amazon S3 bucket and transforms the security logs into JSON documents.
  5. OpenSearch Ingestion ingests this OCSF compliant data into OpenSearch Service.
  6. Download and import provided dashboards to analyze and gain quick insights into the security data.

OpenSearch Ingestion provides a serverless ingestion framework to easily ingest Security Lake data into OpenSearch Service with just a few clicks.

Prerequisites

Complete the following prerequisite steps:

  1. Create an Amazon OpenSearch Service domain. For instructions, refer to Creating and managing Amazon OpenSearch Service domains.
  2. You must have access to the AWS account in which you wish to set up this solution.

Set up Amazon Security Lake

In this section, we present the steps to set up Amazon Security Lake, which includes enabling the service and creating a subscriber.

Enable Amazon Security Lake

Identify the account in which you want to activate Amazon Security Lake. Note that for accounts that are part of organizations, you have to designate a delegated Security Lake administrator from your management account. For instructions, refer to Managing multiple accounts with AWS Organizations.

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console using the credentials of the delegated account.
  2. On the Amazon Security Lake console, choose your preferred Region, then choose Get started.

Amazon Security Lake collects log and event data from a variety of sources and across your AWS accounts and Regions.

Now you’re ready to enable Amazon Security Lake.

  1. You can either select All log and event sources or choose specific logs by selecting Specific log and event sources.
  2. Data is ingested from all Regions. The recommendation is to select All supported regions so activities are logged for accounts that you might not frequently use as well. However, you also have the option to select Specific Regions.
  3. For Select accounts, you can select the accounts in which you want Amazon Security Lake enabled. For this post, we select All accounts.

  1. You’re prompted to either create a new AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role or use an existing IAM role. This gives required permissions to Amazon Security Lake to collect the logs and events. Choose the option appropriate for your situation.
  2. Choose Next.
  3. Optionally, specify the Amazon S3 storage class for the data in Amazon Security Lake. For more information, refer to Lifecycle management in Security Lake.
  4. Choose Next.
  5. Review the details and create the data lake.

Create an Amazon Security Lake subscriber

To access and consume data in your Security Lake managed Amazon S3 buckets, you must set up a subscriber.

Complete the following steps to create your subscriber:

  1. On the Amazon Security Lake console, choose Summary in the navigation pane.

Here, you can see the number of Regions selected.

  1. Choose Create subscriber.

A subscriber consumes logs and events from Amazon Security Lake. In this case, the subscriber is OpenSearch Ingestion, which consumes security data and ingests it into OpenSearch Service.

  1. For Subscriber name, enter OpenSearchIngestion.
  2. Enter a description.
  3. Region is automatically populated based on the current selected Region.
  4. For Log and event sources, select whether the subscriber is authorized to consume all log and event sources or specific log and event sources.
  5. For Data access method, select S3.
  6. For Subscriber credentials, enter the subscriber’s <AWS account ID> and OpenSearchIngestion-<AWS account ID>.
  7. For Notification details, select SQS queue.

This prompts Amazon Security Lake to create an SQS queue that the subscriber can poll for object notifications.

  1. Choose Create.

Install templates and dashboards for Amazon Security Lake data

Your subscriber for OpenSearch Ingestion is now ready. Before you configure OpenSearch Ingestion to process the security data, let’s configure an OpenSearch sink (destination to write data) with index templates and dashboards.

Index templates are predefined mappings for security data that selects the correct OpenSearch field types for corresponding Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) schema definition. In addition, index templates also contain index-specific settings for a particular index patterns. OCSF classifies security data into different categories such as system activity, findings, identity and access management, network activity, application activity and discovery.

Amazon Security Lake publishes events from four different AWS sources: AWS CloudTrail with subsets for AWS Lambda and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud(Amazon VPC) Flow Logs, Amazon Route 53, and AWS Security Hub. The following table details the event sources and their corresponding OCSF categories and OpenSearch index templates.

Amazon Security Lake Source OCSF Category ID OpenSearch Index Pattern
CloudTrail (Lambda and Amazon S3 API subsets) 3005 ocsf-3005*
VPC Flow Logs 4001 ocsf-4001*
Route 53 4003 ocsf-4003*
Security Hub 2001 ocsf-2001*

To easily identify OpenSearch indices containing Security Lake data, we recommend following a structured index naming pattern that includes the log category and its OCSF defined class in the name of the index. An example is provided below

ocsf-cuid-${/class_uid}-${/metadata/product/name}-${/class_name}-%{yyyy.MM.dd}

Complete the following steps to install the index templates and dashboards for your data:

  1. Download the component_templates.zip and index_templates.zip files and unzip them on your local device.

Component templates are composable modules with settings, mappings, and aliases that can be shared and used by index templates.

  1. Upload the component templates before the index templates. For example, the following Linux command line shows how to use the OpenSearch _component_template API to upload to your OpenSearch Service domain (change the domain URL and the credentials to appropriate values for your environment):
    ls component_templates | awk -F'_body' '{print $1}' | xargs -I{} curl  -u adminuser:password -X PUT -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d @component_templates/{}_body.json https://my-opensearch-domain.es.amazonaws.com/_component_template/{}

  2. Once the component templates are successfully uploaded, proceed to upload the index templates:
    ls index_templates | awk -F'_body' '{print $1}' | xargs -I{} curl  -uadminuser:password -X PUT -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d @index_templates/{}_body.json https://my-opensearch-domain.es.amazonaws.com/_index_template/{}

  3. Verify whether the index templates and component templates are uploaded successfully, by navigating to OpenSearch Dashboards, choose the hamburger menu, then choose Index Management.

  1. In the navigation pane, choose Templates to see all the OCSF index templates.

  1. Choose Component templates to verify the OCSF component templates.

  1. After successfully uploading the templates, download the pre-built dashboards and other components required to visualize the Security Lake data in OpenSearch indices.
  2. To upload these to OpenSearch Dashboards, choose the hamburger menu, and under Management, choose Stack Management.
  3. In the navigation pane, choose Saved Objects.

  1. Choose Import.

  1. Choose Import, navigate to the downloaded file, then choose Import.

  1. Confirm the dashboard objects are imported correctly, then choose Done.

All the necessary index and component templates, index patterns, visualizations, and dashboards are now successfully installed.

Configure OpenSearch Ingestion

Each OpenSearch Ingestion pipeline will have a single data source with one or more sub-pipelines, processors, and sink. In our solution, Security Lake managed Amazon S3 is the source and your OpenSearch Service cluster is the sink. Before setting up OpenSearch Ingestion, you need to create the following IAM roles and set up the required permissions:

  • Pipeline role – Defines permissions to read from Amazon Security Lake and write to the OpenSearch Service domain
  • Management role – Defines permission to allow the user to create, update, delete, validate the pipeline and perform other management operations

The following figure shows the permissions and roles you need and how they interact with the solution services.

Before you create an OpenSearch Ingestion pipeline, the principal or the user creating the pipeline must have permissions to perform management actions on a pipeline (create, update, list, and validate). Additionally, the principal must have permission to pass the pipeline role to OpenSearch Ingestion. If you are performing these operations as a non-administrator, add the following permissions to the user creating the pipelines:

{
	"Version": "2012-10-17",
	"Statement": [
		{
			"Effect": "Allow",
			"Resource": "*",
			"Action": [
				"osis:CreatePipeline",
				"osis:ListPipelineBlueprints",
				"osis:ValidatePipeline",
				"osis:UpdatePipeline"
			]
		},
		{
			"_comment": "Replace {your-account-id} with your AWS account ID",
			"Resource": [
				"arn:aws:iam::{your-account-id}:role/pipeline-role"
			],
			"Effect": "Allow",
			"Action": [
				"iam:PassRole"
			]
		}
	]
}

Configure a read policy for the pipeline role

Security Lake subscribers only have access to the source data in the Region you selected when you created the subscriber. To give a subscriber access to data from multiple Regions, refer to Managing multiple Regions. To create a policy for read permissions, you need the name of the Amazon S3 bucket and the Amazon SQS queue created by Security Lake.

Complete the following steps to configure a read policy for the pipeline role:

  1. On the Security Lake console, choose Regions in the navigation pane.
  2. Choose the S3 location corresponding to the Region of the subscriber you created.

  1. Make a note of this Amazon S3 bucket name.

  1. Choose Subscribers in the navigation pane.
  2. Choose the subscriber OpenSearchIngestion that you created earlier.

  1. Take note of the Amazon SQS queue ARN under Subscription endpoint.

  1. On the IAM console, choose Policies in the navigation pane.
  2. Choose Create policy.
  3. In the Specify permissions section, choose JSON to open the policy editor.
  4. Remove the default policy and enter the following code (replace the S3 bucket and SQS queue ARN with the corresponding values):
    {
    	"Version": "2012-10-17",
    	"Statement": [
    		{
    			"Sid": "ReadFromS3",
    			"Effect": "Allow",
    			"Action": "s3:GetObject",
    			"Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::{bucket-name}/*"
    		},
    		{
    			"Sid": "ReceiveAndDeleteSqsMessages",
    			"Effect": "Allow",
    			"Action": [
    				"sqs:DeleteMessage",
    				"sqs:ReceiveMessage"
    			],
    			"_comment": "Replace {your-account-id} with your AWS account ID",
    			"Resource": "arn:aws:sqs:{region}:{your-account-id}:{sqs-queue-name}"
    		}
    	]
    }

  5. Choose Next.
  6. For policy name, enter read-from-securitylake.
  7. Choose Create policy.

You have successfully created the policy to read data from Security Lake and receive and delete messages from the Amazon SQS queue.

The complete process is shown below.

Configure a write policy for the pipeline role

We recommend using fine-grained access control (FGAC) with OpenSearch Service. When you use FGAC, you don’t have to use a domain access policy; you can skip the rest of this section and proceed to creating your pipeline role with the necessary permissions. If you use a domain access policy, you need to create a second policy (for this post, we call it write-to-opensearch) as an added step to the steps in the previous section. Use the following policy code:

{
	"Version": "2012-10-17",
	"Statement": [
		{
			"Effect": "Allow",
			"Action": "es:DescribeDomain",
			"Resource": "arn:aws:es:*:{your-account-id}:domain/*"
		},
		{
			"Effect": "Allow",
			"Action": "es:ESHttp*",
			"Resource": "arn:aws:es:*:{your-account-id}:domain/{domain-name}/*"
		}
	]
}

If the configured role has permissions to access Amazon S3 and Amazon SQS across accounts, OpenSearch Ingestion can ingest data across accounts.

Create the pipeline role with necessary permissions

Now that you have created the policies, you can create the pipeline role. Complete the following steps:

  1. On the IAM console, choose Roles in the navigation pane.
  2. Choose Create role.
  3. For Use cases for other AWS services, select OpenSearch Ingestion pipelines.
  4. Choose Next.
  5. Search for and select the policy read-from-securitylake.
  6. Search for and select the policy write-to-opensearch (if you’re using a domain access policy).
  7. Choose Next.
  8. For Role Name, enter pipeline-role.
  9. Choose Create.

Keep note of the role name; you will be using it while configuring opensearch-pipeline.

Now you can map the pipeline role to an OpenSearch backend role if you’re using FGAC. You can map the ingestion role to one of predefined roles or create your own with necessary permissions. For example, all_access is a built-in role that grants administrative permission to all OpenSearch functions. When deploying to a production environment, make sure to use a role with just enough permissions to write to your Amazon OpenSearch Service domain.

Create the OpenSearch Ingestion pipeline

In this section, you use the pipeline role you created to create an OpenSearch Ingestion pipeline. Complete the following steps:

  1. On the OpenSearch Service console, choose OpenSearch Ingestion in the navigation pane.
  2. Choose Create pipeline.
  3. For Pipeline name, enter a name, such as security-lake-osi.
  4. In the Pipeline configuration section, choose Configuration blueprints and choose AWS-SecurityLakeS3ParquetOCSFPipeline.

  1. Under source, update the following information:
    1. Update the queue_url in the sqs section. (This is the SQS queue that Amazon Security Lake created when you created a subscriber. To get the URL, navigate to the Amazon SQS console and look for the queue ARN created with the format AmazonSecurityLake-abcde-Main-Queue.)
    2. Enter the Region to use for aws credentials.

  1. Under sink, update the following information:
    1. Replace the hosts value in the OpenSearch section with the Amazon OpenSearch Service domain endpoint.
    2. For sts_role_arn, enter the ARN of pipeline-role.
    3. Set region as us-east-1.
    4. For index, enter the index name that was defined in the template created in the previous section ("ocsf-cuid-${/class_uid}-${/metadata/product/name}-${/class_name}-%{yyyy.MM.dd}").
  2. Choose Validate pipeline to verify the pipeline configuration.

If the configuration is valid, a successful validation message appears; you can now proceed to the next steps.

  1. Under Network, select Public for this post. Our recommendation is to select VPC access for an inherent layer of security.
  2. Choose Next.
  3. Review the details and create the pipeline.

When the pipeline is active, you should see the security data ingested into your Amazon OpenSearch Service domain.

Visualize the security data

After OpenSearch Ingestion starts writing your data into your OpenSearch Service domain, you should be able to visualize the data using the pre-built dashboards you imported earlier. Navigate to dashboards and choose any one of the installed dashboards.

For example, choosing DNS Activity will give you dashboards of all DNS activity published in Amazon Security Lake.

This dashboard shows the top DNS queries by account and hostname. It also shows the number of queries per account. OpenSearch Dashboards are flexible; you can add, delete, or update any of these visualizations to suit your organization and business needs.

Clean up

To avoid unwanted charges, delete the OpenSearch Service domain and OpenSearch Ingestion pipeline, and disable Amazon Security Lake.

Conclusion

In this post, you successfully configured Amazon Security Lake to send security data from different sources to OpenSearch Service through serverless OpenSearch Ingestion. You installed pre-built templates and dashboards to quickly get insights from the security data. Refer to Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion to find additional sources from which you can ingest data. For additional use cases, refer to Use cases for Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion.


About the authors

Muthu Pitchaimani is a Search Specialist with Amazon OpenSearch Service. He builds large-scale search applications and solutions. Muthu is interested in the topics of networking and security, and is based out of Austin, Texas.

Aish Gunasekar is a Specialist Solutions architect with a focus on Amazon OpenSearch Service. Her passion at AWS is to help customers design highly scalable architectures and help them in their cloud adoption journey. Outside of work, she enjoys hiking and baking.

Jimish Shah is a Senior Product Manager at AWS with 15+ years of experience bringing products to market in log analytics, cybersecurity, and IP video streaming. He’s passionate about launching products that offer delightful customer experiences, and solve complex customer problems. In his free time, he enjoys exploring cafes, hiking, and taking long walks.

Automate the archive and purge data process for Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL using pg_partman, Amazon S3, and AWS Glue

Post Syndicated from Anand Komandooru original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/automate-the-archive-and-purge-data-process-for-amazon-rds-for-postgresql-using-pg_partman-amazon-s3-and-aws-glue/

The post Archive and Purge Data for Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL Compatibility using pg_partman and Amazon S3 proposes data archival as a critical part of data management and shows how to efficiently use PostgreSQL’s native range partition to partition current (hot) data with pg_partman and archive historical (cold) data in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Customers need a cloud-native automated solution to archive historical data from their databases. Customers want the business logic to be maintained and run from outside the database to reduce the compute load on the database server. This post proposes an automated solution by using AWS Glue for automating the PostgreSQL data archiving and restoration process, thereby streamlining the entire procedure.

AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that makes it easier to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources for analytics, machine learning (ML), and application development. There is no need to pre-provision, configure, or manage infrastructure. It can also automatically scale resources to meet the requirements of your data processing job, providing a high level of abstraction and convenience. AWS Glue integrates seamlessly with AWS services like Amazon S3, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Redshift, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, and Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) to offer a robust, cloud-native data integration solution.

The features of AWS Glue, which include a scheduler for automating tasks, code generation for ETL (extract, transform, and load) processes, notebook integration for interactive development and debugging, as well as robust security and compliance measures, make it a convenient and cost-effective solution for archival and restoration needs.

Solution overview

The solution combines PostgreSQL’s native range partitioning feature with pg_partman, the Amazon S3 export and import functions in Amazon RDS, and AWS Glue as an automation tool.

The solution involves the following steps:

  1. Provision the required AWS services and workflows using the provided AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) project.
  2. Set up your database.
  3. Archive the older table partitions to Amazon S3 and purge them from the database with AWS Glue.
  4. Restore the archived data from Amazon S3 to the database with AWS Glue when there is a business need to reload the older table partitions.

The solution is based on AWS Glue, which takes care of archiving and restoring databases with Availability Zone redundancy. The solution is comprised of the following technical components:

  • An Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Multi-AZ database runs in two private subnets.
  • AWS Secrets Manager stores database credentials.
  • An S3 bucket stores Python scripts and database archives.
  • An S3 Gateway endpoint allows Amazon RDS and AWS Glue to communicate privately with the Amazon S3.
  • AWS Glue uses a Secrets Manager interface endpoint to retrieve database secrets from Secrets Manager.
  • AWS Glue ETL jobs run in either private subnet. They use the S3 endpoint to retrieve Python scripts. The AWS Glue jobs read the database credentials from Secrets Manager to establish JDBC connections to the database.

You can create an AWS Cloud9 environment in one of the private subnets available in your AWS account to set up test data in Amazon RDS. The following diagram illustrates the solution architecture.

Solution Architecture

Prerequisites

For instructions to set up your environment for implementing the solution proposed in this post, refer to Deploy the application in the GitHub repo.

Provision the required AWS resources using AWS CDK

Complete the following steps to provision the necessary AWS resources:

  1. Clone the repository to a new folder on your local desktop.
  2. Create a virtual environment and install the project dependencies.
  3. Deploy the stacks to your AWS account.

The CDK project includes three stacks: vpcstack, dbstack, and gluestack, implemented in the vpc_stack.py, db_stack.py, and glue_stack.py modules, respectively.

These stacks have preconfigured dependencies to simplify the process for you. app.py declares Python modules as a set of nested stacks. It passes a reference from vpcstack to dbstack, and a reference from both vpcstack and dbstack to gluestack.

gluestack reads the following attributes from the parent stacks:

  • The S3 bucket, VPC, and subnets from vpcstack
  • The secret, security group, database endpoint, and database name from dbstack

The deployment of the three stacks creates the technical components listed earlier in this post.

Set up your database

Prepare the database using the information provided in Populate and configure the test data on GitHub.

Archive the historical table partition to Amazon S3 and purge it from the database with AWS Glue

The “Maintain and Archive” AWS Glue workflow created in the first step consists of two jobs: “Partman run maintenance” and “Archive Cold Tables.”

The “Partman run maintenance” job runs the Partman.run_maintenance_proc() procedure to create new partitions and detach old partitions based on the retention setup in the previous step for the configured table. The “Archive Cold Tables” job identifies the detached old partitions and exports the historical data to an Amazon S3 destination using aws_s3.query_export_to_s3. In the end, the job drops the archived partitions from the database, freeing up storage space. The following screenshot shows the results of running this workflow on demand from the AWS Glue console.

Archive job run result

Additionally, you can set up this AWS Glue workflow to be triggered on a schedule, on demand, or with an Amazon EventBridge event. You need to use your business requirement to select the right trigger.

Restore archived data from Amazon S3 to the database

The “Restore from S3” Glue workflow created in the first step consists of one job: “Restore from S3.”

This job initiates the run of the partman.create_partition_time procedure to create a new table partition based on your specified month. It subsequently calls aws_s3.table_import_from_s3 to restore the matched data from Amazon S3 to the newly created table partition.

To start the “Restore from S3” workflow, navigate to the workflow on the AWS Glue console and choose Run.

The following screenshot shows the “Restore from S3” workflow run details.

Restore job run result

Validate the results

The solution provided in this post automated the PostgreSQL data archival and restoration process using AWS Glue.

You can use the following steps to confirm that the historical data in the database is successfully archived after running the “Maintain and Archive” AWS Glue workflow:

  1. On the Amazon S3 console, navigate to your S3 bucket.
  2. Confirm the archived data is stored in an S3 object as shown in the following screenshot.
    Archived data in S3
  3. From a psql command line tool, use the \dt command to list the available tables and confirm the archived table ticket_purchase_hist_p2020_01 does not exist in the database.List table result after post archival

You can use the following steps to confirm that the archived data is restored to the database successfully after running the “Restore from S3” AWS Glue workflow.

  1. From a psql command line tool, use the \dt command to list the available tables and confirm the archived table ticket_history_hist_p2020_01 is restored to the database.List table results after restore

Clean up

Use the information provided in Cleanup to clean up your test environment created for testing the solution proposed in this post.

Summary

This post showed how to use AWS Glue workflows to automate the archive and restore process in RDS for PostgreSQL database table partitions using Amazon S3 as archive storage. The automation is run on demand but can be set up to be trigged on a recurring schedule. It allows you to define the sequence and dependencies of jobs, track the progress of each workflow job, view run logs, and monitor the overall health and performance of your tasks. Although we used Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL as an example, the same solution works for Amazon Aurora-PostgreSQL Compatible Edition as well. Modernize your database cron jobs using AWS Glue by using this post and the GitHub repo. Gain a high-level understanding of AWS Glue and its components by using the following hands-on workshop.


About the Authors

Anand Komandooru is a Senior Cloud Architect at AWS. He joined AWS Professional Services organization in 2021 and helps customers build cloud-native applications on AWS cloud. He has over 20 years of experience building software and his favorite Amazon leadership principle is “Leaders are right a lot.”

Li Liu is a Senior Database Specialty Architect with the Professional Services team at Amazon Web Services. She helps customers migrate traditional on-premise databases to the AWS Cloud. She specializes in database design, architecture, and performance tuning.

Neil Potter is a Senior Cloud Application Architect at AWS. He works with AWS customers to help them migrate their workloads to the AWS Cloud. He specializes in application modernization and cloud-native design and is based in New Jersey.

Vivek Shrivastava is a Principal Data Architect, Data Lake in AWS Professional Services. He is a big data enthusiast and holds 14 AWS Certifications. He is passionate about helping customers build scalable and high-performance data analytics solutions in the cloud. In his spare time, he loves reading and finds areas for home automation.

Try semantic search with the Amazon OpenSearch Service vector engine

Post Syndicated from Stavros Macrakis original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/try-semantic-search-with-the-amazon-opensearch-service-vector-engine/

Amazon OpenSearch Service has long supported both lexical and vector search, since the introduction of its kNN plugin in 2020. With recent developments in generative AI, including AWS’s launch of Amazon Bedrock earlier in 2023, you can now use Amazon Bedrock-hosted models in conjunction with the vector database capabilities of OpenSearch Service, allowing you to implement semantic search, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), recommendation engines, and rich media search based on high-quality vector search. The recent launch of the vector engine for Amazon OpenSearch Serverless makes it even easier to deploy such solutions.

OpenSearch Service supports a variety of search and relevance ranking techniques. Lexical search looks for words in the documents that appear in the queries. Semantic search, supported by vector embeddings, embeds documents and queries into a semantic high-dimension vector space where texts with related meanings are nearby in the vector space and therefore semantically similar, so that it returns similar items even if they don’t share any words with the query.

We’ve put together two demos on the public OpenSearch Playground to show you the strengths and weaknesses of the different techniques: one comparing textual vector search to lexical search, the other comparing cross-modal textual and image search to textual vector search. With OpenSearch’s Search Comparison Tool, you can compare the different approaches. For the demo, we’re using the Amazon Titan foundation model hosted on Amazon Bedrock for embeddings, with no fine tuning. The dataset consists of a selection of Amazon clothing, jewelry, and outdoor products.

Background

A search engine is a special kind of database, allowing you to store documents and data and then run queries to retrieve the most relevant ones. End-user search queries usually consist of text entered in a search box. Two important techniques for using that text are lexical search and semantic search. In lexical search, the search engine compares the words in the search query to the words in the documents, matching word for word. Only items that have all or most of the words the user typed match the query. In semantic search, the search engine uses a machine learning (ML) model to encode text from the source documents as a dense vector in a high-dimensional vector space; this is also called embedding the text into the vector space. It similarly codes the query as a vector and then uses a distance metric to find nearby vectors in the multi-dimensional space. The algorithm for finding nearby vectors is called kNN (k Nearest Neighbors). Semantic search does not match individual query terms—it finds documents whose vector embedding is near the query’s embedding in the vector space and therefore semantically similar to the query, so the user can retrieve items that don’t have any of the words that were in the query, even though the items are highly relevant.

Textual vector search

The demo of textual vector search shows how vector embeddings can capture the context of your query beyond just the words that compose it.

In the text box at the top, enter the query tennis clothes. On the left (Query 1), there’s an OpenSearch DSL (Domain Specific Language for queries) semantic query using the amazon_products_text_embedding index, and on the right (Query 2), there’s a simple lexical query using the amazon_products_text index. You’ll see that lexical search doesn’t know that clothes can be tops, shorts, dresses, and so on, but semantic search does.

Search Comparison Tool

Compare semantic and lexical results

Similarly, in a search for warm-weather hat, the semantic results find lots of hats suitable for warm weather, whereas the lexical search returns results mentioning the words “warm” and “hat,” all of which are warm hats suitable for cold weather, not warm-weather hats. Similarly, if you’re looking for long dresses with long sleeves, you might search for long long-sleeved dress. A lexical search ends up finding some short dresses with long sleeves and even a child’s dress shirt because the word “dress” appears in the description, whereas the semantic search finds much more relevant results: mostly long dresses with long sleeves, with a couple of errors.

Cross-modal image search

The demo of cross-modal textual and image search shows searching for images using textual descriptions. This works by finding images that are related to your textual descriptions using a pre-production multi-modal embedding. We’ll compare searching for visual similarity (on the left) and textual similarity (on the right). In some cases, we get very similar results.

Search Comparison Tool

Compare image and textual embeddings

For example, sailboat shoes does a good job with both approaches, but white sailboat shoes does much better using visual similarity. The query canoe finds mostly canoes using visual similarity—which is probably what a user would expect—but a mixture of canoes and canoe accessories such as paddles using textual similarity.

If you are interested in exploring the multi-modal model, please reach out to your AWS specialist.

Building production-quality search experiences with semantic search

These demos give you an idea of the capabilities of vector-based semantic vs. word-based lexical search and what can be accomplished by utilizing the vector engine for OpenSearch Serverless to build your search experiences. Of course, production-quality search experiences use many more techniques to improve results. In particular, our experimentation shows that hybrid search, combining lexical and vector approaches, typically results in a 15% improvement in search result quality over lexical or vector search alone on industry-standard test sets, as measured by the NDCG@10 metric (Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain in the first 10 results). The improvement is because lexical outperforms vector for very specific names of things, and semantic works better for broader queries. For example, in the semantic vs. lexical comparison, the query saranac 146, a brand of canoe, works very well in lexical search, whereas semantic search doesn’t return relevant results. This demonstrates why the combination of semantic and lexical search provides superior results.

Conclusion

OpenSearch Service includes a vector engine that supports semantic search as well as classic lexical search. The examples shown in the demo pages show the strengths and weaknesses of different techniques. You can use the Search Comparison Tool on your own data in OpenSearch 2.9 or higher.

Further information

For further information about OpenSearch’s semantic search capabilities, see the following:


About the author

Stavros Macrakis is a Senior Technical Product Manager on the OpenSearch project of Amazon Web Services. He is passionate about giving customers the tools to improve the quality of their search results.

Introducing AWS Glue crawler and create table support for Apache Iceberg format

Post Syndicated from Sandeep Adwankar original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/introducing-aws-glue-crawler-and-create-table-support-for-apache-iceberg-format/

Apache Iceberg is an open table format for large datasets in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and provides fast query performance over large tables, atomic commits, concurrent writes, and SQL-compatible table evolution. Iceberg has become very popular for its support for ACID transactions in data lakes and features like schema and partition evolution, time travel, and rollback. Iceberg captures metadata information on the state of datasets as they evolve and change over time.

AWS Glue crawlers now support Iceberg tables, enabling you to use the AWS Glue Data Catalog and migrate from other Iceberg catalogs easier. AWS Glue crawlers will extract schema information and update the location of Iceberg metadata and schema updates in the Data Catalog. You can then query the Data Catalog Iceberg tables across all analytics engines and apply AWS Lake Formation fine-grained permissions.

The Iceberg catalog helps you manage a collection of Iceberg tables and tracks the table’s current metadata. Iceberg provides several implementation options for the Iceberg catalog, including the AWS Glue Data Catalog, Hive Metastore, and JDBC catalogs. Customers prefer using or migrating to the AWS Glue Data Catalog because of its integrations with AWS analytical services such as Amazon Athena, AWS Glue, Amazon EMR, and Lake Formation.

With today’s launch, you can create and schedule an AWS Glue crawler to existing Iceberg tables into in the Data Catalog. You can then provide one or multiple S3 paths where the Iceberg tables are located. You have the option to provide the maximum depth of S3 paths that the crawler can traverse. With each crawler run, the crawler inspects each of the S3 paths and catalogs the schema information, such as new tables, deletes, and updates to schemas in the Data Catalog. Crawlers support schema merging across all snapshots and update the latest metadata file location in the Data Catalog that AWS analytical engines can directly use.

Additionally, AWS Glue is launching support for creating new (empty) Iceberg tables in the Data Catalog using the AWS Glue console or AWS Glue CreateTable API. Before the launch, customers who wanted to adopt Iceberg table format were required to generate Iceberg’s metadata.json file on Amazon S3 using PutObject separately in addition to CreateTable. Often, customers have used the create table statement on analytics engines such as Athena, AWS Glue, and so on. The new CreateTable API eliminates the need to create the metadata.json file separately, and automates generating metadata.json based on the given API input. Also, customers who manage deployments using AWS CloudFormation templates can now create Iceberg tables using the CreateTable API. For more details, refer to Creating Apache Iceberg tables.

For accessing the data using Athena, you can also use Lake Formation to secure your Iceberg table using fine-grained access control permissions when you register the Amazon S3 data location with Lake Formation. For source data in Amazon S3 and metadata that is not registered with Lake Formation, access is determined by AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions policies for Amazon S3 and AWS Glue actions.

Solution overview

For our example use case, a customer uses Amazon EMR for data processing and Iceberg format for the transactional data. They store their product data in Iceberg format on Amazon S3 and host the metadata of their datasets in Hive Metastore on the EMR primary node. The customer wants to make product data accessible to analyst personas for interactive analysis using Athena. Many AWS analytics services don’t integrate natively with Hive Metastore, so we use an AWS Glue crawler to populate the metadata in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. Athena supports Lake Formation permissions on Iceberg tables, so we apply fine-grained access for data access.

We configure the crawler to onboard the Iceberg schema to the Data Catalog and use Lake Formation access control for crawling. We apply Lake Formation grants on the database and crawled table to enable analyst users to query the data and verify using Athena.

After we populate the schema of the existing Iceberg dataset to the Data Catalog, we onboard new Iceberg tables to the Data Catalog and load data into the newly created data using Athena. We apply Lake Formation grants on the database and newly created table to enable analyst users to query the data and verify using Athena.

The following diagram illustrates the solution architecture.

Set up resources with AWS CloudFormation

To set up the solution resources using AWS CloudFormation, complete the following steps:

  1. Log in to the AWS Management Console as IAM administrator.
  2. Choose Launch Stack to deploy a CloudFormation template.
  3. Choose Next.
  4. On the next page, choose Next.
  5. Review the details on the final page and select I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources.
  6. Choose Create.

The CloudFormation template generates the following resources:

  • VPC, subnet, and security group for the EMR cluster
  • Data lake bucket to store Iceberg table data and metadata
  • IAM roles for the crawler and Lake Formation registration
  • EMR cluster and steps to create an Iceberg table with Hive Metastore
  • Analyst role for data access
  • Athena bucket path for results

  1. When the stack is complete, on the AWS CloudFormation console, navigate to the Resources tab of the stack.
  2. Note down the values of EmrClusterId, DataLakeBucketName, LFRegisterLocationServiceRole, AWSGlueServiceRole, AthenaBucketName, and LFBusinessAnalystRole.
  3. Navigate to the Amazon EMR console and choose the EMR cluster you created.
  4. Navigate to the Steps tab and verify that the steps were run.

This script run creates the database icebergcrawlerblodb using Hive and the Iceberg table product. It uses the Hive Metastore server on Amazon EMR as the metastore and stores the data on Amazon S3.

  1. Navigate to the S3 bucket you created and verify if the data and metadata are created for the Iceberg table.

Some of the resources that this stack deploys incur costs when in use.

Now that the data is on Amazon S3, we can register the bucket with Lake Formation to implement access control and centralize the data governance.

Set up Lake Formation permissions

To use the AWS Glue Data Catalog in Lake Formation, complete the following steps to update the Data Catalog settings to use Lake Formation permissions to control Data Catalog resources instead of IAM-based access control:

  1. Sign in to the Lake Formation console as admin.
    • If this is the first time accessing the Lake Formation console, add yourself as the data lake administrator.
  2. In the navigation pane, under Data catalog, choose Settings.
  3. Deselect Use only IAM access control for new databases.
  4. Deselect Use only IAM access control for new tables in new databases.
  5. Choose Version 3 for Cross account version settings.
  6. Choose Save.

Now you can set up Lake Formation permissions.

Register the data lake S3 bucket with Lake Formation

To register the data lake S3 bucket, complete the following steps:

  1. On the Lake Formation console, in the navigation pane, choose Data lake locations.
  2. Choose Register location.
  3. For Amazon S3 path, enter the data lake bucket path.
  4. For IAM role, choose the role noted from the CloudFormation template for LFRegisterLocationServiceRole.
  5. Choose Register location.

Grant crawler role access to the data location

To grant access to the crawler, complete the following steps:

  1. On the Lake Formation console, in the navigation pane, choose Data locations.
  2. Choose Grant.
  3. For IAM users and roles, choose the role for the crawler.
  4. For Storage locations, enter the data lake bucket path.
  5. Choose Grant.

Create database and grant access to the crawler role

Complete the following steps to create your database and grant access to the crawler role:

  1. On the Lake Formation console, in the navigation pane, choose Databases.
  2. Choose Create database.
  3. Provide the name icebergcrawlerblogdb for the database.
  4. Make sure Use only IAM access control for new tables in this database option is not selected.
  5. Choose Create database.
  6. On the Action menu, choose Grant.
  7. For IAM users and roles, choose the role for the crawler.
  8. Leave the database specified as icebergcrawlerblogdb.
  9. Select Create table, Describe, and Alter for Database permissions.
  10. Choose Grant.

Configure the crawler for Iceberg

To configure your crawler for Iceberg, complete the following steps:

  1. On the AWS Glue console, in the navigation pane, choose Crawlers.
  2. Choose Create crawler.
  3. Enter a name for the crawler. For this post, we use icebergcrawler.
  4. Under Data source configuration, choose Add data source.
  5. For Data source, choose Iceberg.
  6. For S3 path, enter s3://<datalakebucket>/icebergcrawlerblogdb.db/.
  7. Choose Add a Iceberg data source.

Support for Iceberg tables is available through CreateCrawler and UpdateCrawler APIs and adding the additional IcebergTarget as a target, with the following properties:

  • connectionId – If your Iceberg tables are stored in buckets that require VPC authorization, you can set your connection properties here
  • icebergTables – This is an array of icebergPaths strings, each indicating the folder with which the metadata files for an Iceberg table resides

See the following code:

{
    "IcebergTarget": {
        "connectionId": "iceberg-connection-123",
        "icebergMetaDataPaths": [
            "s3://bucketA/",
            "s3://bucketB/",
            "s3://bucket3/financedb/financetable/"
        ]
        "exclusions": ["departments/**", "employees/folder/**"]
        "maximumDepth": 5
    }
}
  1. Choose Next.
  2. For Existing IAM role, enter the crawler role created by the stack.
  3. Under Lake Formation configuration, select Use Lake Formation credentials for crawling S3 data source.
  4. Choose Next.
  5. Under Set output and scheduling, specify the target database as icebergcrawlerblogdb.
  6. Choose Next.
  7. Choose Create crawler.
  8. Run the crawler.

During each crawl, for each icebergTable path provided, the crawler calls the Amazon S3 List API to find the most recent metadata file under that Iceberg table metadata folder and updates the metadata_location parameter to the latest manifest file.

The following screenshot shows the details after a successful run.

The crawler was able to crawl the S3 data source and successfully populate the schema for Iceberg data in the Data Catalog.

You can now start using the Data Catalog as your primary metastore and create new Iceberg tables directly in the Data Catalog or using the createtable API.

Create a new Iceberg table

To create an Iceberg table in the Data Catalog using the console, complete the steps in this section. Alternatively, you can use a CloudFormation template to create an Iceberg table using the following code:

Type: AWS::Glue::Table
Properties: 
  CatalogId:"<account_id>"
  DatabaseName:"icebergcrawlerblogdb"
  TableInput:
    Name: "product_details"
    StorageDescriptor:
       Columns:
         - Name: "product_id"
           Type: "string"
         - Name: "manufacture_name"
           Type: "string"
         - Name: "product_rating"
           Type: "int"
       Location: "s3://<datalakebucket>/icebergcrawlerblogdb.db/"
    TableType: "EXTERNAL_TABLE"
  OpenTableFormatInput:
    IcebergInput:
      MetadataOperation: "CREATE"
      Version: "2"

Grant the IAM role access to the data location

First, grant the IAM role access to the data location:

  1. On the Lake Formation console, in the navigation pane, choose Data locations.
  2. Choose Grant.
  3. Select Admin IAM role for IAM users and roles.
  4. For Storage location, enter the data lake bucket path.
  5. Choose Grant.

Create the Iceberg table

Complete the following steps to create the Iceberg table:

  1. On the Lake Formation console, in the navigation pane, choose Tables.
  2. Choose Create table.
  3. For Name, enter product_details.
  4. Choose icebergcrawlerblogdb for Database.
  5. Select Apache Iceberg table for Table format.
  6. Provide the path for <datalakebucket>/icebergcrawlerblogdb.db/ for Table location.
  7. Provide the following schema and choose Upload schema:
    [
         {
             "Name": "product_id",
             "Type": "string"
         },
         {
             "Name": "manufacture_name",
             "Type": "string"
         },
         {
             "Name": "product_rating",
             "Type": "int"
         }
     ]

  8. Choose Submit to create the table.

Add a record to the new Iceberg table

Complete the following steps to add a record to the Iceberg table:

  1. On the Athena console, navigate to the query editor.
  2. Choose Edit settings to configure the Athena query results bucket using the value noted from the CloudFormation output for AthenaBucketName.
  3. Choose Save.
  4. Run the following query to add a record to the table:
    insert into icebergcrawlerblogdb.product_details values('00001','ABC Company',10)

Configure Lake Formation permissions on the Iceberg table in the Data Catalog

Athena supports Lake Formation permission on Iceberg tables, so for this post, we show you how to set up fine-grained access on the tables and query them using Athena.

Now the data lake admin can delegate permissions on the database and table to the LFBusinessAnalystRole-IcebergBlogIAM role via the Lake Formation console.

Grant the role access to the database and describe permissions

To grant the LFBusinessAnalystRole-IcebergBlogIAM role access to the database with describe permissions, complete the following steps:

  1. On the Lake Formation console, under Permissions in the navigation pane, choose Data lake permissions.
  2. Choose Grant
  3. Under Principals, select IAM users and roles.
  4. Choose the IAM role LFBusinessAnalystRole-IcebergBlog.
  5. Under LF-Tags or catalog resources, choose icebergcrawlerblogdb for Databases.
  6. Select Describe for Database permissions.
  7. Choose Grant to apply the permissions.

Grant column access to the role

Next, grant column access to the LFBusinessAnalystRole-IcebergBlogIAM role:

  1. On the Lake Formation console, under Permissions in the navigation pane, choose Data lake permissions.
  2. Choose Grant.
  3. Under Principals, select IAM users and roles.
  4. Choose the IAM role LFBusinessAnalystRole-IcebergBlog.
  5. Under LF-Tags or catalog resources, choose icebergcrawlerblogdb for Databases and product for Tables.
  6. Choose Select for Table permissions.
  7. Under Data permissions, select Column-based access.
  8. Select Include columns and choose product_name and price.
  9. Choose Grant to apply the permissions.

Grant table access to the role

Lastly, grant table access to the LFBusinessAnalystRole-IcebergBlogIAM role:

  1. On the Lake Formation console, under Permissions in the navigation pane, choose Data lake permissions.
  2. Choose Grant.
  3. Under Principals, select IAM users and roles.
  4. Choose the IAM role LFBusinessAnalystRole-IcebergBlog.
  5. Under LF-Tags or catalog resources, choose icebergcrawlerblogdb for Databases and product_details for Tables.
  6. Choose Select and Describe for Table permissions.
  7. Choose Grant to apply the permissions.

Verify the tables using Athena

To verify the tables using Athena, switch to LFBusinessAnalystRole-IcebergBlogrole and complete the following steps:

  1. On the Athena console, navigate to the query editor.
  2. Choose Edit settings to configure the Athena query results bucket using the value noted from the CloudFormation output for AthenaBucketName.
  3. Choose Save.
  4. Run the queries on product and product_details to validate access.

The following screenshot shows column permissions on product.

The following screenshot shows table permissions on product_details.

We have successfully crawled the Iceberg dataset created from Hive Metastore with data on Amazon S3 and created an AWS Glue Data Catalog table with the schema populated. We registered the data lake bucket with Lake Formation and enabled crawling access to the data lake using Lake Formation permissions. We granted Lake Formation permissions on the database and table to the analyst user and validated access to the data using Athena.

Clean up

To avoid unwanted charges to your AWS account, delete the AWS resources:

  1. Sign in to the CloudFormation console as the IAM admin used for creating the CloudFormation stack.
  2. Delete the CloudFormation stack you created.

Conclusion

With the support for Iceberg crawlers, you can quickly move to using the AWS Glue Data Catalog as your primary Iceberg table catalog. You can automatically register Iceberg tables into the Data Catalog by running an AWS Glue crawler, which doesn’t require any DDL or manual schema definition. You can start building your serverless transactional data lake on AWS using the AWS Glue crawler, create a new table using the Data Catalog, and utilize Lake Formation fine-grained access controls for querying Iceberg tables formats by Athena.

Refer to Working with other AWS services for Lake Formation support for Iceberg tables across various AWS analytical services.

Special thanks to everyone who contributed to this crawler and createtable feature launch: Theo Xu, Kyle Duong, Anshuman Sharma, Atreya Srivathsan, Eric Wu, Jack Ye, Himani Desai, Atreya Srivathsan, Masoud Shahamiri and Sachet Saurabh.

If you have questions or suggestions, submit them in the comments section.


About the authors

Sandeep Adwankar is a Senior Technical Product Manager at AWS. Based in the California Bay Area, he works with customers around the globe to translate business and technical requirements into products that enable customers to improve how they manage, secure, and access data.

Srividya Parthasarathy is a Senior Big Data Architect on the AWS Lake Formation team. She enjoys building data mesh solutions and sharing them with the community.

Mahesh Mishra is a Principal Product Manager with AWS Lake Formation team. He works with many of AWS largest customers on emerging technology needs, and leads several data and analytics initiatives within AWS including strong support for Transactional Data Lakes.

Implement a serverless CDC process with Apache Iceberg using Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Athena

Post Syndicated from Vijay Velpula original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/implement-a-serverless-cdc-process-with-apache-iceberg-using-amazon-dynamodb-and-amazon-athena/

Apache Iceberg is an open table format for very large analytic datasets. Iceberg manages large collections of files as tables, and it supports modern analytical data lake operations such as record-level insert, update, delete, and time travel queries. The Iceberg specification allows seamless table evolution such as schema and partition evolution, and its design is optimized for usage on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Iceberg also helps guarantee data correctness under concurrent write scenarios.

Most businesses store their critical data in a data lake, where you can bring data from various sources to a centralized storage. Change Data Capture (CDC) in the context of a data lake refers to the process of capturing and propagating changes made to source data. Source systems often lack the capability to publish data that is modified or changed. This requires data pipelines to consume full load datasets every day, increasing the data processing duration and also the storage cost. If the source is tabular format, then there are mechanisms to identify the data changes easily. However, the complexity increases if the data is in semi-structured format and propagating changes made to source data into the data lake in near-real-time.

This post presents a solution to handle incoming semi-structured datasets from source systems and effectively determine changed records and load them into Iceberg tables. With this approach, we will not only use Athena to query data source files in Amazon S3, but also achieve ACID compliance.

Solution overview

We demonstrate this solution with an end-to-end serverless CDC process. We use a sample JSON file as input to Amazon DynamoDB. We identify changed records by utilizing Amazon DynamoDB Streams and AWS Lambda to update the data lake with changed records. We then utilize an Iceberg table to demonstrate CDC functionality for a sample employee dataset. This data represents employee details such as name, address, date joined, and other fields.

The architecture is implemented as follows:

  1. Source systems ingest a semi-structured (JSON) dataset into a DynamoDB table.
  2. The DynamoDB table stores the semi-structured dataset, and these tables have DynamoDB Streams enabled. DynamoDB Streams helps identify if the incoming data is new, modified, or deleted based on the keys defined and delivers the ordered messages to a Lambda function.
  3. For every stream, the Lambda function parses the stream and builds the dynamic DML SQL statements.
  4. The constructed DML SQL statements are run on the corresponding Iceberg tables to reflect the changes.

The following diagram illustrates this workflow.

Prerequisites

Before you get started, make sure you have the following prerequisites:

Deploy the solution

For this solution, we provide a CloudFormation template that sets up the services included in the architecture, to enable repeatable deployments.

Note : – Deploying the CloudFormation stack in your account incurs AWS usage charges.

To deploy the solution, complete the following steps:

  1. Choose Launch Stack to launch the CloudFormation stack.
  2. Enter a stack name.
  3. Select I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources with custom names.
  4. Choose Create stack.

After the CloudFormation stack deployment is complete, navigate to AWS CloudFormation console to note the following resources on the Outputs tab:

  • Data lake S3 bucket – iceberg-cdc-xxxxx-us-east-1-xxxxx
  • AthenaWorkGroupName – AthenaWorkgroup-xxxxxx
  • DataGeneratorLambdaFunction – UserRecordsFunction-xxxxxx
  • DynamoDBTableName – users_xxxxxx
  • LambdaDMLFunction – IcebergUpsertFunction-xxxxxx
  • AthenaIcebergTableName – users_xxxxxx

Generate sample employee data and load into the DynamoDB table using Lambda

To test the solution, trigger the UserRecordsFunction-XXXXX function by creating a test event which loads sample data into DynamoDB table.

  1. On the Lambda console, open the Lambda function with the name UserRecordsFunction-XXXXX.
  2. On the Code tab, choose Test, then Configure test event.
  3. Configure a test event with the default hello-world template event JSON.
  4. Provide an event name without any changes to the template and save the test event.
  5. On the Test tab, choose Test to trigger the SampleEvent test event. This will invoke the data generator Lambda function to load data into the users_xxxxxx DynamoDB table. When the test event is complete, you should notice a success notification as shown in the following screenshot.
  6. On the DynamoDB console, navigate to the users_XXXXXX table and choose Explore table items to verify the data loaded into the table.

The data loads performed on the DynamoDB table will be cascaded to the Athena table with the help of the IcebergUpsertFunction-xxxxx Lambda function deployed by CloudFormation template.

In the following sections, we simulate and validate various scenarios to demonstrate Iceberg capabilities, including DML operations, time travel, and optimizations.

Simulate the scenarios and validate CDC functionality in Athena

After the first run of the data generator Lambda function, navigate to the Athena query editor, choose the AthenaWorkgroup-XXXXX workgroup, and preview the user_XXXXXX Iceberg table to query the records.

With the data inserted into the DynamoDB table, all the data change activities such as inserts, updates, and deletes are captured in DynamoDB Streams. DynamoDB Streams triggers IcebergUpsertFunction-xxxxx Lambda function which processes the events in the order they are received. IcebergUpsertFunction-xxxxx function, performs the following steps:

  • Receives the stream event
  • Parses the stream event based on the  DynamdoDB eventType (insert, update, or delete) and eventually generates an Athena DML SQL statement
  • Runs the SQL statement in Athena

Let’s deep dive in to the IcebergUpsertFunction-XXXX function code and how it handles various scenarios.

IcebergUpsertFunction-xxxxx function code

As indicated in the following Lambda function code block, the DynamoDB Streams event received by the function, categorizes events based on eventType—INSERT, MODIFY, or DELETE. Any other event raises InvalidEventException. MODIFY is considered an UPDATE event.

All the DML operations are run on the user_XXXXXX table in Athena. We fetch the metadata of the users_xxxxxx table from Athena. The following are a few important considerations regarding how the Lambda function handles Iceberg table metadata changes:

  • In this approach, target metadata takes precedence during DML operations.
  • Any columns that are missing in the target will be excluded in the DML command.
  • It’s imperative that the source and target metadata match. Incase new columns and attributes are added to source table than the current solution is configured to skip the new columns and attributes.
  • This solution can be enhanced further to cascade source system metadata changes to the target table in Athena.

The following is the Lambda function code:

def iceberg_upsert(event, database, tablename):
    response ={}
    logger.info(f'Started iceberg_upsert executing.')
    logger.info(f'Started parsing received event.')
    
    # Determine type of event
    resp=event
    eventName=resp['eventName']
    
    # call for athena function 
    athresp=retrieve_athena_table_metadata(database,tablename) 
    try:
        AthenTblMd=athresp['TableMetadata']['Columns']
    except Exception as e:
        logger.error(f"Athena Metadata does not have column information. Please check table {tablename} and database {database} ")
        raise(e)
    else: # else block for try/except
        logger.info(f"{AthenTblMd}")
        
    try:
        if eventName == "INSERT":
            sqlstmt=insert_stmt(resp,AthenTblMd,database,tablename)
            logger.info(sqlstmt)
            response=run_query(sqlstmt, database_name, athena_workgroup, output_location,wait_time)
        elif eventName == "MODIFY":
            sqlstmt=update_stmt(resp,AthenTblMd,database,tablename)
            logger.info(sqlstmt)
            response=run_query(sqlstmt, database_name, athena_workgroup, output_location,wait_time)
        elif eventName == "REMOVE":
            sqlstmt=del_stmt(resp,database,tablename)
            logger.info(sqlstmt)
            response=run_query(sqlstmt, database_name, athena_workgroup, output_location,wait_time)
        else:
            raise InvalidEventTypeException
        
    except InvalidEventTypeException:
        logger.warning(f'Event type should be INSERT/MODIFY/REMOVE. Received event type is : {eventName}.')
        logger.warning(f'Skipping applying grant/revoke permissions.')
    except Exception as e:
        logger.error("iceberg_upsert function failed with error")
        raise(e)
    else : # else block for try/except
        return response

The following code uses the Athena Boto3 client to fetch the table metadata:

def retrieve_athena_table_metadata(databaseName, tableName, catalogName=None):
    if catalogName is None:
        catalogName='AWSDATACATALOG' # default value 
    try:
        athenaTblMd=client.get_table_metadata(CatalogName=catalogName,DatabaseName=databaseName,TableName=tableName)
    except Exception as e:
        logger.error("Athena Table Metadata retrieval function Failed.Please check exception", e)
        raise(e) 
    else: # else block for try except
        return athenaTblMd

Insert operations

Now let’s see how insert operations are handled with the sample data generated in the DynamoDB table.

  1. On the DynamoDB console, navigate to the users_XXXXX table.
  2. Choose Create item.
  3. Enter a sample record with the following code:
    {
      "emp_no": {
         "N": "11"
      },
      "country": {
         "S": "USA"
      },
      "dateOfBirth": {
         "S": "1991-10-23"
      },
      "first_name": {
         "S": "Tom"
      },
      "isContractAthlete": {
         "BOOL": false
      },
      "job": {
         "S": "Sr Manager"
      },
      "last_name": {
         "S": "Carter"
      },
      "phone_number": {
         "S": "+1-226-333-789"
      },
      "sex": {
         "S": "male"
      },
      "ssn": {
         "S": "434-98-2345"
      }
    }
    

  4. Choose Create item to insert the new record into the DynamoDB table.

After the item is created in the DynamoDB table, a stream event is generated in DynamoDB Streams, which triggers the Lambda function. The function processes the event and generates an equivalent INSERT SQL statement to run on the Athena table. The following screenshot shows the INSERT SQL that was generated by the Lambda function on the Athena console in the Recent queries section.

The IcebergUpsertFunction-xxxxx Lambda code has modularized functions for each eventType. The following code highlights the function, which processes insert eventType streams:

def insert_stmt(insert_event_resp,AthenTblMd,database,tablename):
    resp=insert_event_resp
    
    Tablevalues=resp['dynamodb']['NewImage']
    Tblvalues={ k.lower():v for k,v in Tablevalues.items()} # converting key names to lowercase to prevent case-sensitive mismatches
    
    val_list=unpack_dict(Tblvalues,AthenTblMd)
    col_nm,val_for_col=[],[]
 
    for item in val_list:
        
        if item.get('data') is not None:
            col_nm.append(item['Name'])
            if item['Type'] != 'string':
                val_for_col.append(f"CAST ({(item['data'])} AS {item['Type']})" )
            else:
                val_for_col.append(str((item['data'])))
 
    colnames_with_doublequotes=",".join([f'"{i}"' for i in col_nm])
    values_formatted=",".join([f"{i}" if i.startswith('CAST') else f"'{i}'" for i in val_for_col] )
 
    return f"insert into {database}.{tablename} ({colnames_with_doublequotes}) values ({values_formatted})"

This function parses the create item stream event and constructs an INSERT SQL statement in the following format:

INSERT into <tablename> values (val1, val2....)

The function returns a string, which is an ANSI SQL compliant statement that can be run directly in Athena.

Update operations

For our update operation, let’s identify the current state of a record in the Athena table. We see emp_no=5 and its column values in Athena and compare them to the DynamoDB table. If there are no changes, the records should be the same, as shown in the following screenshots.

Let’s initiate an edit item operation in the DynamoDB table. We modify the following values:

  • IsContractAthlete – True
  • Phone_number – 123-456-789

After the item is edited in the DynamoDB table, a MODIFY stream event is generated in DynamoDB Streams, which triggers the Lambda function. The function processes the event and generates the equivalent UPDATE SQL statement to run on the Athena table.

MODIFY DynamoDB Streams events have two components: the old image and the new image. Here we parse only the new image data section to construct an UPDATE ANSI SQL statement and run it on the Athena tables.

The following update_stmt code block parses the modify item stream event and constructs the corresponding UPDATE SQL statement with new image data. The code block performs the following steps:

  • Finds the key columns for the WHERE clause
  • Finds columns for the SET clause
  • Ensures key columns are not part of the SET command

The function returns a string that is a SQL ANSI compliant statement that can be run directly in Athena. For example:

UPDATE <TABLENAME> SET col = value where key = value

See the following code:

def update_stmt(update_event_resp,AthenTblMd,database,tablename):
    resp=update_event_resp
    
    Tablevalues=resp['dynamodb']['NewImage']
    primary_key_col_names=resp['dynamodb']['Keys']     
    
    Tblvalues={ k.lower():v for k,v in Tablevalues.items()} # converting key names to lowercase to prevent case-sensitive mismatches
    
    new_upd_AthenaTblMd=AthenTblMd.copy()
    where_nm,set_nm=[],[]
    forUpdate=Tblvalues.copy()
 
    # removing primary keys from the stream dictionary so that SET command for Update can be constructed.
    for col_pkey in primary_key_col_names.keys():
        forUpdate.pop(col_pkey,None)
    
 
    for position,item in enumerate(AthenTblMd):
        if forUpdate.get(item.get('Name')) is not None:
            datafromsource=(list(forUpdate.get(item.get('Name')).values())[0])
            new_upd_AthenaTblMd[position]['data']=datafromsource
 
    # For set clause
    for item in new_upd_AthenaTblMd:
        if item.get('data') is not None:
            if item['Type'] != 'string':
                set_nm.append(f"{item['Name']} = CAST ('{(item['data'])}' AS {item['Type']})")
            else:
                set_nm.append(f" {item['Name']} = '{item['data']}' ")
    
    set_cmd=f" set {','.join(set_nm)}"
    
    # for where clause
    for key, val in primary_key_col_names.items():
        where_nm.append(f" {key} = {list(val.values())[0]}")
 
    where_cmd=f" where {' and '.join(where_nm)}"
 
    return (f" UPDATE {database}.{tablename} {set_cmd}  {where_cmd}")

In the Athena table, we can see the columns IsContractAthlete and Phone_number have been updated to the recent values. The other column values remain the same because they weren’t modified.

Delete operations

For delete operations, let’s identify the current state of a record in Athena table. We choose emp_no=6 for this activity.

  1. On the DynamoDB console, navigate to the user table.
  2. Select the record for emp_no=6.
  3. On the Actions menu, choose Delete items.

After the delete item operation is performed on the DynamoDB table, it generates a DELETE eventType in the DynamoDB stream, which triggers the Iceberg-Upsert Lambda function.

The DELETE function removes the data based on key columns in the stream. The following function parses the stream to identify key columns of the deleted item. We construct a DELETE DML SQL statement with a WHERE clause of emp_no=6:

DELETE &lt;TABLENAME&gt; WHERE key = value

See the following code:

def del_stmt(del_event_resp,database,tablename):
    
    resp=del_event_resp
    
    primary_key_col_names=resp['dynamodb']['Keys'] 
    del_where_nm=[]
    
    for key, val in primary_key_col_names.items():
        del_where_nm.append(f" {key} = {list(val.values())[0]}")
 
    del_where_cmd=f" where {' and '.join(del_where_nm)}"
    return f" DELETE FROM {database}.{tablename} {del_where_cmd} "   

The function returns a string, which is an ANSI SQL compliant statement that can be run directly in Athena. The following screenshot shows the DELETE statement that was run in Athena.

As you can see from the following screenshot, emp_no=6 record no longer exists in the Iceberg table when queried with Athena.

Time travel

Time travel queries in Athena query Amazon S3 for historical data from a consistent snapshot as of a specified date and time. Iceberg tables provide the capability of time travel. Each Iceberg table maintains a versioned manifest of the S3 objects that it contains. Previous versions of the manifest can be used for time travel and version travel queries. Version travel queries in Athena query Amazon S3 for historical data as of a specified snapshot ID. Iceberg format tracks every change that happened to the table in the tablename$iceberg_history table. When you query them, it will show timestamps when the changes occurred in the table.

Let’s find the timestamp when a DELETE statement was applied to the Athena table. In our query, it corresponds to the time 2023-04-18 21:34:13.970. With this timestamp, let’s query the main table to see if the emp_no=6 exists in it.

As shown in the following screenshot, the query result shows that the deleted record exists, and this can be used to reinsert data if required.

Optimize Iceberg tables

Every insert and update operation on an Iceberg table creates a separate data and metadata file. If there are multiple such update and insert operations, it might lead to multiple small fragmented files. Having these small files can cause an unnecessary number of metadata and less efficient queries. Utilize Athena OPTIMIZE command to compact these small files.

OPTIMIZE

The OPTIMIZE table REWRITE DATA compaction action rewrites data files into a more optimized layout based on their size and number of associated delete files.

The following query shows the number of data files that exist before the compaction process:

SELECT * FROM "users_73591300$iceberg_files"

The following query performs compaction on the Iceberg table:

OPTIMIZE "users_73591300$iceberg_files" REWRITE DATA USING BIN_PACK

We can observe that the compaction process merged multiple data files into a larger file.

VACUUM

The VACUUM statement on Iceberg tables removes data files that are no longer relevant, which reduces metadata size and storage consumption. VACUUM removes unwanted files older than the amount of time that is specified by the vacuum_max_snapshot_age_seconds table property (default 432000), as shown in the following code:

ALTER TABLE users_73591300 SET TBLPROPERTIES ('vacuum_max_snapshot_age_seconds'='259200')

The following query performs a vacuum operation on the Iceberg table:

VACUUM users_73591300

Clean up

When you have finished experimenting with this solution, clean up your resources to prevent AWS charges from being incurred:

  1. Empty the S3 buckets.
  2. Delete the stack from the AWS CloudFormation console.

Conclusion

In this post, we introduced a serverless CDC solution for semi-structured data using DynamoDB Streams and processing them in Iceberg tables. We demonstrated how to ingest semi-structured data in DynamoDB, identify changed data using DynamoDB Streams, and process them in Iceberg tables. We can expand the solution to build SCD type-2 functionality in data lakes to track historical data changes. This solution is appropriate for low frequency of updates, but for high frequency and larger volumes of data, we can aggregate the changes in a separate intermediate table using DynamoDB Streams and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, and then run periodic MERGE operations into the main Iceberg table.

We hope this post provided insights on how to process semi-structured data in a data lake when sources systems lack CDC capability.


About the authors

Vijay Velpula is a Data Lake Architect with AWS Professional Services. He helps customers building  modern data platforms through implementing Big Data & Analytics solutions. Outside of work, he enjoys spending time with family, traveling, hiking and biking.

Karthikeyan Ramachandran is a Data Architect with AWS Professional Services. He specializes in MPP systems helping Customers build and maintain Data warehouse environments. Outside of work, he likes to binge-watch tv shows and loves playing cricket and volleyball.

Sriharsh Adari is a Senior Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he helps customers work backwards from business outcomes to develop innovative solutions on AWS. Over the years, he has helped multiple customers on data platform transformations across industry verticals. His core area of expertise include Technology Strategy, Data Analytics, and Data Science. In his spare time, he enjoys playing sports, binge-watching TV shows, and playing Tabla.

Derive operational insights from application logs using Automated Data Analytics on AWS

Post Syndicated from Aparajithan Vaidyanathan original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/derive-operational-insights-from-application-logs-using-automated-data-analytics-on-aws/

Automated Data Analytics (ADA) on AWS is an AWS solution that enables you to derive meaningful insights from data in a matter of minutes through a simple and intuitive user interface. ADA offers an AWS-native data analytics platform that is ready to use out of the box by data analysts for a variety of use cases. With ADA, teams can ingest, transform, govern, and query diverse datasets from a range of data sources without requiring specialist technical skills. ADA provides a set of pre-built connectors to ingest data from a wide range of sources including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon CloudTrail, and Amazon DynamoDB as well as many others.

ADA provides a foundational platform that can be used by data analysts in a diverse set of use cases including IT, finance, marketing, sales, and security. ADA’s out-of-the-box CloudWatch data connector allows data ingestion from CloudWatch logs in the same AWS account in which ADA has been deployed, or from a different AWS account.

In this post, we demonstrate how an application developer or application tester is able to use ADA to derive operational insights of applications running in AWS. We also demonstrate how you can use the ADA solution to connect to different data sources in AWS. We first deploy the ADA solution into an AWS account and set up the ADA solution by creating data products using data connectors. We then use the ADA Query Workbench to join the separate datasets and query the correlated data, using familiar Structured Query Language (SQL), to gain insights. We also demonstrate how ADA can be integrated with business intelligence (BI) tools such as Tableau to visualize the data and to build reports.

Solution overview

In this section, we present the solution architecture for the demo and explain the workflow. For the purposes of demonstration, the bespoke application is simulated using an AWS Lambda function that emits logs in Apache Log Format at a preset interval using Amazon EventBridge. This standard format can be produced by many different web servers and be read by many log analysis programs. The application (Lambda function) logs are sent to a CloudWatch log group. The historical application logs are stored in an S3 bucket for reference and for querying purposes. A lookup table with a list of HTTP status codes along with the descriptions is stored in a DynamoDB table. These three serve as sources from which data is ingested into ADA for correlation, query, and analysis. We deploy the ADA solution into an AWS account and set up ADA. We then create the data products within ADA for the CloudWatch log group, S3 bucket, and DynamoDB. As the data products are configured, ADA provisions data pipelines to ingest the data from the sources. With the ADA Query Workbench, you can query the ingested data using plain SQL for application troubleshooting or issue diagnosis.

The following diagram provides an overview of the architecture and workflow of using ADA to gain insights into application logs.

The workflow includes the following steps:

  1. A Lambda function is scheduled to be triggered at 2-minute intervals using EventBridge.
  2. The Lambda function emits logs that are stored at a specified CloudWatch log group under /aws/lambda/CdkStack-AdaLogGenLambdaFunction. The application logs are generated using the Apache Log Format schema but stored in the CloudWatch log group in JSON format.
  3. The data products for CloudWatch, Amazon S3, and DynamoDB are created in ADA. The CloudWatch data product connects to the CloudWatch log group where the application (Lambda function) logs are stored. The Amazon S3 connector connects to an S3 bucket folder where the historical logs are stored. The DynamoDB connector connects to a DynamoDB table where the status codes that are referred by the application and historical logs are stored.
  4. For each of the data products, ADA deploys the data pipeline infrastructure to ingest data from the sources. When the data ingestion is complete, you can write queries using SQL via the ADA Query Workbench.
  5. You can log in to the ADA portal and compose SQL queries from the Query Workbench to gain insights in to the application logs. You can optionally save the query and share the query with other ADA users in the same domain. The ADA query feature is powered by Amazon Athena, which is a serverless, interactive analytics service that provides a simplified, flexible way to analyze petabytes of data.
  6. Tableau is configured to access the ADA data products via ADA egress endpoints. You then create a dashboard with two charts. The first chart is a heat map that shows the prevalence of HTTP error codes correlated with the application API endpoints. The second chart is a bar chart that shows the top 10 application APIs with a total count of HTTP error codes from the historical data.

Prerequisites

For this post, you need to complete the following prerequisites:

  1. Install the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) prerequisites, TypeScript-specific prerequisites, and git.
  2. Deploy the ADA solution in your AWS account in the us-east-1 Region.
    1. Provide an admin email while launching the ADA AWS CloudFormation stack. This is needed for ADA to send the root user password. An admin phone number is required to receive a one-time password message if multi-factor authentication (MFA) is enabled. For this demo, MFA is not enabled.
  3. Build and deploy the sample application (available on the GitHub repo) solution so that the following resources can be provisioned in your account in the us-east-1 Region:
    1. A Lambda function that simulates the logging application and an EventBridge rule that invokes the application function at 2-minute intervals.
    2. An S3 bucket with the relevant bucket policies and a CSV file that contains the historical application logs.
    3. A DynamoDB table with the lookup data.
    4. Relevant AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles and permissions required for the services.
  4. Optionally, install Tableau Desktop, a third-party BI provider. For this post, we use Tableau Desktop version 2021.2. There is a cost involved in using a licensed version of the Tableau Desktop application. For additional details, refer to the Tableau licensing information.

Deploy and set up ADA

After ADA is deployed successfully, you can log in using the admin email provided during the installation. You then create a domain named CW_Domain. A domain is a user-defined collection of data products. For example, a domain might be a team or a project. Domains provide a structured way for users to organize their data products and manage access permissions.

  1. On the ADA console, choose Domains in the navigation pane.
  2. Choose Create domain.
  3. Enter a name (CW_Domain) and description, then choose Submit.

Set up the sample application infrastructure using AWS CDK

The AWS CDK solution that deploys the demo application is hosted on GitHub. The steps to clone the repo and to set up the AWS CDK project are detailed in this section. Before you run these commands, be sure to configure your AWS credentials. Create a folder, open the terminal, and navigate to the folder where the AWS CDK solution needs to be installed. Run the following code:

gh repo clone aws-samples/operational-insights-with-automated-data-analytics-on-aws
cd operational-insights-with-automated-data-analytics-on-aws
npm install
npm run build
cdk synth
cdk deploy

These steps perform the following actions:

  • Install the library dependencies
  • Build the project
  • Generate a valid CloudFormation template
  • Deploy the stack using AWS CloudFormation in your AWS account

The deployment takes about 1–2 minutes and creates the DynamoDB lookup table, Lambda function, and S3 bucket containing the historical log files as outputs. Copy these values to a text editing application, such as Notepad.

Create ADA data products

We create three different data products for this demo, one for each data source that you’ll be querying to gain operational insights. A data product is a dataset (a collection of data such as a table or a CSV file) that has been successfully imported into ADA and that can be queried.

Create a CloudWatch data product

First, we create a data product for the application logs by setting up ADA to ingest the CloudWatch log group for the sample application (Lambda function). Use the CdkStack.LambdaFunction output to get the Lambda function ARN and locate the corresponding CloudWatch log group ARN on the CloudWatch console.

Then complete the following steps:

  1. On the ADA console, navigate to the ADA domain and create a CloudWatch data product.
  2. For Name¸ enter a name.
  3. For Source type, choose Amazon CloudWatch.
  4. Disable Automatic PII.

ADA has a feature that automatically detects personally identifiable information (PII) data during import that is enabled by default. For this demo, we disable this option for the data product because the discovery of PII data is not in the scope of this demo.

  1. Choose Next.
  2. Search for and choose the CloudWatch log group ARN copied from the previous step.
  3. Copy the log group ARN.
  4. On the data product page, enter the log group ARN.
  5. For CloudWatch Query, enter a query that you want ADA to get from the log group.

In this demo, we query the @message field because we’re interested in getting the application logs from the log group.

  1. Select how the data updates are triggered after initial import.

ADA can be configured to ingest the data from the source at flexible intervals (up to 15 minutes or later) or on demand. For the demo, we set the data updates to run hourly.

  1. Choose Next.

Next, ADA will connect to the log group and query the schema. Because the logs are in Apache Log Format, we transform the logs into separate fields so that we can run queries on the specific log fields. ADA provides four default transformations and supports custom transformation through a Python script. In this demo, we run a custom Python script to transform the JSON message field into Apache Log Format fields.

  1. Choose Transform schema.
  2. Choose Create new transform.
  3. Upload the apache-log-extractor-transform.py script from the /asset/transform_logs/ folder.
  4. Choose Submit.

ADA will transform the CloudWatch logs using the script and present the processed schema.

  1. Choose Next.
  2. In the last step, review the steps and choose Submit.

ADA will start the data processing, create the data pipelines, and prepare the CloudWatch log groups to be queried from the Query Workbench. This process will take a few minutes to complete and will be shown on the ADA console under Data Products.

Create an Amazon S3 data product

We repeat the steps to add the historical logs from the Amazon S3 data source and look up reference data from the DynamoDB table. For these two data sources, we don’t create custom transforms because the data formats are in CSV (for historical logs) and key attributes (for reference lookup data).

  1. On the ADA console, create a new data product.
  2. Enter a name (hist_logs) and choose Amazon S3.
  3. Copy the Amazon S3 URI (the text after arn:aws:s3:::) from the CdkStack.S3 output variable and navigate to the Amazon S3 console.
  4. In the search box, enter the copied text, open the S3 bucket, select the /logs folder, and choose Copy S3 URI.

The historical logs are stored in this path.

  1. Navigate back to the ADA console and enter the copied S3 URI for S3 location.
  2. For Update Trigger, select On Demand because the historical logs are updated at an unspecified frequency.
  3. For Update Policy, select Append to append newly imported data to the existing data.
  4. Choose Next.

ADA processes the schema for the files in the selected folder path. Because the logs are in CSV format, ADA is able to read the column names without requiring additional transformations. However, the columns status_code and request_size are inferred as long type by ADA. We want to keep the column data types consistent among the data products so that we can join the data tables and query the data. The column status_code will be used to create joins across the data tables.

  1. Choose Transform schema to change the data types of the two columns to string data type.

Note the highlighted column names in the Schema preview pane prior to applying the data type transformations.

  1. In the Transform plan pane, under Built-in transforms, choose Apply Mapping.

This option allows you to change the data type from one type to another.

  1. In the Apply Mapping section, deselect Drop other fields.

If this option is not disabled, only the transformed columns will be preserved and all other columns will be dropped. Because we want to retain all the columns, we disable this option.

  1. Under Field Mappings¸ for Old name and New name, enter status_code and for New type, enter string.
  2. Choose Add Item.
  3. For Old name and New name¸ enter request_size and for New data type, enter string.
  4. Choose Submit.

ADA will apply the mapping transformation on the Amazon S3 data source. Note the column types in the Schema preview pane.

  1. Choose View sample to preview the data with the transformation applied.

ADA will display the PII data acknowledgement to ensure that either only authorized users can view the data or that the dataset doesn’t contain any PII data.

  1. Choose Agree to continue to view the sample data.

Note that the schema is identical to the CloudWatch log group schema because both the current application and historical application logs are in Apache Log Format.

  1. In the final step, review the configuration and choose Submit.

ADA starts processing the data from the Amazon S3 source, creates the backend infrastructure, and prepares the data product. This process takes a few minutes depending upon the size of the data.

Create a DynamoDB data product

Lastly, we create a DynamoDB data product. Complete the following steps:

  1. On the ADA console, create a new data product.
  2. Enter a name (lookup) and choose Amazon DynamoDB.
  3. Enter the Cdk.DynamoDBTable output variable for DynamoDB Table ARN.

This table contains key attributes that will be used as a lookup table in this demo. For the lookup data, we are using the HTTP codes and long and short descriptions of the codes. You can also use PostgreSQL, MySQL, or a CSV file source as an alternative.

  1. For Update Trigger, select On-Demand.

The updates will be on demand because the lookup is mostly for reference purpose while querying and any updates to the lookup data can be updated in ADA using on-demand triggers.

  1. Choose Next.

ADA reads the schema from the underlying DynamoDB schema and presents the column name and type for optional transformation. We will proceed with the default schema selection because the column types are consistent with the types from the CloudWatch log group and Amazon S3 CSV data source. Having data types that are consistent across the data sources allows us to write queries to fetch records by joining the tables using the column fields. For example, the column key in the DynamoDB schema corresponds to the status_code in the Amazon S3 and CloudWatch data products. We can write queries that can join the three tables using the column name key. An example is shown in the next section.

  1. Choose Continue with current schema.
  2. Review the configuration and choose Submit.

ADA will process the data from the DynamoDB table data source and prepare the data product. Depending upon the size of the data, this process takes a few minutes.

Now we have all the three data products processed by ADA and available for you to run queries.

Use the Query Workbench to query the data

ADA allows you to run queries against the data products while abstracting the data source and making it accessible using SQL (Structured Query Language). You can write queries and join the tables just as you would query against tables in a relational database. We demonstrate ADA’s querying capability via two user scenarios. In both the scenarios, we join an application log dataset to the error codes lookup table. In the first use case, we query the current application logs to identify the top 10 most accessed application endpoints along with the corresponding HTTP status codes:

--Query the top 10 Application endpoints along with the corresponding HTTP request type and HTTP status code.

SELECT logs.endpoint AS Application_EndPoint, logs.http_request AS REQUEST, count(logs.endpoint) as Endpoint_Count, ref.key as HTTP_Status_Code, ref.short as Description
FROM cw_domain.cloud_watch_application_logs logs
INNER JOIN cw_domain.lookup ref ON logs.status_code = ref.key
where logs.status_code LIKE '4%%' OR logs.status_code LIKE '5%%' -- = '/v1/server'
GROUP BY logs.endpoint, logs.http_request, ref.key, ref.short
ORDER BY Endpoint_Count DESC
LIMIT 10

In the second example, we query the historical logs table to get the top 10 application endpoints with the most errors to understand the endpoint call pattern:

-- Query Historical Logs to get the top 10 Application Endpoints with most number of errors along with an explanation of the error code.

SELECT endpoint as Application_EndPoint, count(status_code) as Error_Count, ref.long as Description FROM cw_domain.hist_logs hist
INNER JOIN cw_domain.lookup ref ON hist.status_code = ref.key
WHERE hist.status_code LIKE '4%%' OR hist.status_code LIKE '5%%'
GROUP BY endpoint, status_code, ref.long
ORDER BY Error_Count desc
LIMIT 10

In addition to querying, you can optionally save the query and share the saved query with other users in the same domain. The shared queries are accessible directly from the Query Workbench. The query results can also be exported to CSV format.

Visualize ADA data products in Tableau

ADA offers the ability to connect to third-party BI tools to visualize data and create reports from the ADA data products. In this demo, we use ADA’s native integration with Tableau to visualize the data from the three data products we configured earlier. Using Tableau’s Athena connector and following the steps in Tableau configuration, you can configure ADA as a data source in Tableau. After a successful connection has been established between Tableau and ADA, Tableau will populate the three data products under the Tableau catalog cw_domain.

We then establish a relationship across the three databases using the HTTP status code as the joining column, as shown in the following screenshot. Tableau allows us to work in online and offline mode with the data sources. In online mode, Tableau will connect to ADA and query the data products live. In offline mode, we can use the Extract option to extract the data from ADA and import the data in to Tableau. In this demo, we import the data in to Tableau to make the querying more responsive. We then save the Tableau workbook. We can inspect the data from the data sources by choosing the database and Update Now.

With the data source configurations in place in Tableau, we can create custom reports, charts, and visualizations on the ADA data products. Let’s consider two use cases for visualizations.

As shown in the following figure, we visualized the frequency of the HTTP errors by application endpoints using Tableau’s built-in heat map chart. We filtered out the HTTP status codes to only include error codes in the 4xx and 5xx range.

We also created a bar chart to depict the application endpoints from the historical logs ordered by the count of HTTP error codes. In this chart, we can see that the /v1/server/admin endpoint has generated the most HTTP error status codes.

Clean up

Cleaning up the sample application infrastructure is a two-step process. First, to remove the infrastructure provisioned for the purposes of this demo, run the following command in the terminal:

cdk destroy

For the following question, enter y and AWS CDK will delete the resources deployed for the demo:

Are you sure you want to delete: CdkStack (y/n)? y

Alternatively, you can remove the resources via the AWS CloudFormation console by navigating to the CdkStack stack and choosing Delete.

The second step is to uninstall ADA. For instructions, refer to Uninstall the solution.

Conclusion

In this post, we demonstrated how to use the ADA solution to derive insights from application logs stored across two different data sources. We demonstrated how to install ADA on an AWS account and deploy the demo components using AWS CDK. We created data products in ADA and configured the data products with the respective data sources using the ADA’s built-in data connectors. We demonstrated how to query the data products using standard SQL queries and generate insights on the log data. We also connected the Tableau Desktop client, a third-party BI product, to ADA and demonstrated how to build visualizations against the data products.

ADA automates the process of ingesting, transforming, governing, and querying diverse datasets and simplifying the lifecycle management of data. ADA’s pre-built connectors allow you to ingest data from diverse data sources. Software teams with basic knowledge of AWS products and services will be able to set up an operational data analytics platform in a few hours and provide secure access to the data. The data can then be easily and quickly queried using an intuitive and standalone web user interface.

Try out ADA today to easily manage and gain insights from data.


About the authors

Aparajithan Vaidyanathan is a Principal Enterprise Solutions Architect at AWS. He supports enterprise customers migrate and modernize their workloads on AWS cloud. He is a Cloud Architect with 23+ years of experience designing and developing enterprise, large-scale and distributed software systems. He specializes in Machine Learning & Data Analytics with focus on Data and Feature Engineering domain. He is an aspiring marathon runner and his hobbies include hiking, bike riding and spending time with his wife and two boys.

Rashim Rahman is a Software Developer based out of Sydney, Australia with 10+ years of experience in software development and architecture. He works primarily on building large scale open-source AWS solutions for common customer use cases and business problems. In his spare time, he enjoys sports and spending time with friends and family.

Hafiz Saadullah is a Principal Technical Product Manager at Amazon Web Services. Hafiz focuses on AWS Solutions, designed to help customers by addressing common business problems and use cases.

Use Amazon Athena to query data stored in Google Cloud Platform

Post Syndicated from Jonathan Wong original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/use-amazon-athena-to-query-data-stored-in-google-cloud-platform/

As customers accelerate their migrations to the cloud and transform their businesses, some find themselves in situations where they have to manage data analytics in a multi-cloud environment, such as acquiring a company that runs on a different cloud provider. Customers who use multi-cloud environments often face challenges in data access and compatibility that can create blockades and slow down productivity.

When managing multi-cloud environments, customers must look for services that address these gaps through features providing interoperability across clouds. With the release of the Amazon Athena data source connector for Google Cloud Storage (GCS), you can run queries within AWS to query data in Google Cloud Storage, which can be stored in relational, non-relational, object, and custom data sources, whether that be Parquet or comma-separated value (CSV) format. Athena provides the connectivity and query interface and can easily be plugged into other AWS services for downstream use cases such as interactive analysis and visualizations. Some examples include AWS data analytics services such as AWS Glue for data integration, Amazon QuickSight for business intelligence (BI), as well as third-party software and services from AWS Marketplace.

This post demonstrates how to use Athena to run queries on Parquet or CSV files in a GCS bucket.

Solution overview

The following diagram illustrates the solution architecture.

The Athena Google Cloud Storage connector uses both AWS and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), so we will be referencing both cloud providers in the architecture diagram.

We use the following AWS services in this solution:

  • Amazon Athena – A serverless interactive analytics service. We use Athena to run queries on data stored on Google Cloud Storage.
  • AWS Lambda – A serverless compute service that is event driven and manages the underlying resources for you. We deploy a Lambda function data source connector to connect AWS with Google Cloud Provider.
  • AWS Secrets Manager – A secrets management service that helps protect access to your applications and services. We reference the secret in Secrets Manager in the Lambda function so we can run a query on AWS and it can access the data stored on Google Cloud Provider.
  • AWS Glue – A serverless data analytics service for data discovery, preparation, and integration. We create an AWS Glue database and table to point to the correct bucket and files within Google Cloud Storage.
  • Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) – An object storage service that stores data as objects within buckets. We create an S3 bucket to store data that exceeds the Lambda function’s response size limits.

The Google Cloud Platform portion of the architecture contains a few services as well:

  • Google Cloud Storage – A managed service for storing unstructured data. We use Google Cloud Storage to store data within a bucket that will be used in a query from Athena, and we upload a CSV file directly to the GCS bucket.
  • Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) – The central source to control and manage visibility for cloud resources. We use Google Cloud IAM to create a service account and generate a key that will allow AWS to access GCP. We create a key with the service account, which is uploaded to Secrets Manager.

Prerequisites

For this post, we create a VPC and security group that will be used in conjunction with the GCP connector. For complete steps, refer to Creating a VPC for a data source connector. The first step is to create the VPC using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), as shown in the following screenshot.

Then we create a security group for the VPC, as shown in the following screenshot.

For more information about the prerequisites, refer to Amazon Athena Google Cloud Storage connector. Additionally, there are tables that highlight the specific data types that can be used such as CSV and Parquet files. There are also required permissions to run the solution.

Google Cloud Platform configuration

To begin, you must have either CSV or Parquet files stored within a GCS bucket. To create the bucket, refer to Create buckets. Make sure to note the bucket name—it will be referenced in a later step. After you create the bucket, upload your objects to the bucket. For instructions, refer to Upload objects from a filesystem.

The CSV data used in this example came from Mockaroo, which generated random test data as shown in the following screenshot. In this example, we use a CSV file, but you can also use Parquet files.

Additionally, you must create a service account to generate a key pair within Google Cloud IAM, which will be uploaded to Secrets Manager. For full instructions, refer to Create service accounts.

After you create the service account, you can create a key. For instructions, refer to Create and delete service account keys.

AWS configuration

Now that you have a GCS bucket with a CSV file and a generated JSON key file from Google Cloud Platform, you can proceed with the rest of the steps on AWS.

  1. On the Secrets Manager console, choose Secrets in the navigation pane.
  2. Choose Store a new secret and specify Other type of secret.
  3. Provide the GCP generated key file content.

The next step is to deploy the Athena Google Cloud Storage connector. For more information, refer to Using the Athena console.

  1. On the Athena console, add a new data source.
  2. Select Google Cloud Storage.

  1. For Data source name, enter a name.
  2. For Lambda function, choose Create Lambda function to be redirected to the Lambda console.

  1. In the Application settings section, enter the information for Application name, SpillBucket, GCSSecretName, and LambdaFunctionName.

  1. You also have to create an S3 bucket to reference the S3 spill bucket parameter in order to store data that exceeds the Lambda function’s response size limits. For more information, refer to Create your first S3 bucket.

After you provide the Lambda function’s application settings, you’re redirected to the Review and create page.

  1. Confirm that these are the correct fields and choose Create data source.

Now that the data source connector has been created, you can connect Athena to the data source.

  1. On the Athena console, navigate to the data source.
  2. Under Data source details, choose the link for the Lambda function.

You can reference the Lambda function to connect to the data source. As an optional step and for validation, the variables that were put into the Lambda function can be found within the Lambda function’s environment variables on the Configuration tab.

  1. Because the built-in GCS connector schema inference capability is limited, it’s recommended to create an AWS Glue database and table for your metadata. For instructions, refer to Setting up databases and tables in AWS Glue.

The following screenshot shows our database details.

The following screenshot shows our table details.

Query the data

Now you can run queries on Athena that will access the data stored on Google Cloud Storage.

  1. On the Athena console, choose the correct data source, database, and table within the query editor.
  2. RunSELECT * FROM [AWS Glue Database name].[AWS Glue Table name]in the query editor.

As shown in the following screenshot, the results will be from the bucket on Google Cloud Storage.

The data that is stored on Google Cloud Platform can be accessed through AWS and used for many use cases, such as performing business intelligence, machine learning, or data science. Doing so can help unblock developers and data scientists so they can efficiently provide results and save time.

Clean up

Complete the following steps to clean up your resources:

  1. Delete the provisioned bucket in Google Cloud Storage.
  2. Delete the service account under IAM & Admin.
  3. Delete the secret GCP credentials in Secrets Manager.
  4. Delete the S3 spill bucket.
  5. Delete the Athena connector Lambda function.
  6. Delete the AWS Glue database and table.

Troubleshooting

If you receive a ROLLBACK_COMPLETE state and “can not be updated error” when creating the data source in Lambda, go to AWS CloudFormation, delete the CloudFormation stack, and try recreating it.

If the AWS Glue table doesn’t appear in the Athena query editor, verify that the data source and database values are correctly selected in the Data pane on the Athena query editor console.

Conclusion

In this post, we saw how you can minimize the time and effort required to access data on Google Cloud Platform and use it efficiently on AWS. Using the data connector helps organizations become multi-cloud agnostic and helps accelerate business growth. Additionally, you can build out BI applications with the discoveries, relationships, and insights found when analyzing the data, which can further your organization’s data analysis process.


About the Author

Jonathan Wong is a Solutions Architect at AWS assisting with initiatives within Strategic Accounts. He is passionate about solving customer challenges and has been exploring emerging technologies to accelerate innovation.

Configure SAML federation for Amazon OpenSearch Serverless with Okta

Post Syndicated from Aish Gunasekar original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/configure-saml-federation-for-amazon-opensearch-serverless-with-okta/

Modern applications apply security controls across many systems and their subsystems. Keeping all of these systems in sync would be a major undertaking if you tried to implement it separately. Centralized identity management is the way to maintain a single identity provider (IdP) that can authenticate actors and manage and distribute their rights.

OpenSearch is an open-source search and analytics suite that enables you to ingest, store, analyze, and visualize full text and log data. Amazon OpenSearch Serverless makes it simple to deploy, scale, and operate OpenSearch in the AWS Cloud, freeing you from the undifferentiated heavy lifting of sizing, scaling, and operating an OpenSearch cluster. When you use OpenSearch Serverless, you can integrate with your existing Security Assertion Markup Language 2.0 (SAML)-compliant IdP to provide granular access control for your OpenSearch Serverless collections. Our customers use a variety of IdPs, including AWS IAM Identity Center (successor to AWS SSO), Okta, Keycloak, Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS), and Auth0.

In this post, you will learn how to use Okta as your IdP and integrate it with OpenSearch Serverless to securely manage your users and groups for secure access to your data.

Solution overview

The flow of access requests is depicted in the following figure.

When you navigate to OpenSearch Dashboards, the workflow steps are as follows:

  1. OpenSearch Serverless generates a SAML authentication request.
  2. OpenSearch Serverless redirects your request back to the browser.
  3. The browser redirects to the Okta URL via the Okta application setup.
  4. Okta parses the SAML request, authenticates the user, and generates a SAML response.
  5. Okta returns the encoded SAML response to the browser.
  6. The browser sends the SAML response back to the OpenSearch Serverless Assertion Consumer Services (ACS) URL.
  7. ACS verifies the SAML response and logs in the user with the permissions defined in the data access policy.

Prerequisites

Complete the following prerequisite steps:

  1. Create an OpenSearch Serverless collection. For instructions, refer to Preview: Amazon OpenSearch Serverless – Run Search and Analytics Workloads without Managing Clusters.
  2. Make a note of your AWS account ID to use while configuring your application in Okta.
  3. Create an Okta account, which you will use as an IdP.
  4. Create users and a group in Okta:
    1. Log in to your Okta account, and in the navigation pane, choose Directory, then choose Groups.
    2. Choose Add Group and name itopensearch-serverless, then choose Save.
    3. Choose Assign People to add users.
    4. You can add users to theopensearch-serverlessgroup by choosing the plus sign next to the user name, or you can choose Add All.
    5. Add your users, then choose Save.
    6. To create new users, choose People in the navigation pane under Directory, then choose Add Person.
    7. Provide your first name, last name, user name (email ID), and primary email address.
    8. For Password, choose Set by admin and First-time password.
    9. To create your user, choose Save.
    10. In the navigation pane, choose Groups, then choose theopensearch-serverless group you created earlier.

The following graphic gives a quick demonstration of setting up a user and group.

Configure an application in Okta

To configure an application in Okta, complete the following steps:

  1. Navigate to the Applications page on the Okta console.
  2. Choose App Integration, select SAML 2.0 web application, then choose Next.
  3. For Name, enter a name for the app (for example, myweblogs), then choose Next.
  4. Under Application ACS URL, enter the URL using the format https://collection.<REGION>.aoss.amazonaws.com/_saml/acs (replace <REGION> with the corresponding Region) to generate the IdP metadata.
  5. Select Use this for Recipient URL and Destination URL to use the same ACS URL as the recipient and destination.
  6. Specify aws:opensearch:<AWS-Account-ID> under Audience URI (SP Entity ID). This specifies who the assertion is intended for within the SAML assertion.
  7. Under Group Attribute Statements, enter a name that is relevant to your application, such as mygroup, and select unspecified as the name format. (Don’t forget this name, you’ll need it later.)
  8. Select equals as the filter and enter opensearch-serverless.
  9. Select I’m a software vendor. I’d like to integrate my app with Okta and choose Finish.
  10. After an app is created, choose the sign-on tab, scroll down to the metadata details, and copy the value for Metadata URL.

The following graphic gives a quick demonstration of setting up an application in Okta via the preceding steps.

Next, you associate the users and groups to the application that you created in the previous step.

  1. On the Applications page, choose the app you created earlier.
  2. On the Assignments tab, choose Assign.
  3. Select Assign To Groups and choose the group you wish to assign to (opensearch-serverlessin this case).
  4. Choose Done.

The following graphic gives a quick demonstration of assigning groups to the application via the preceding steps.

Set up SAML on OpenSearch Serverless

In this section, you create a SAML provider that you’ll use for your OpenSearch Serverless collection. Complete the following steps:

  1. Open the OpenSearch Serverless console on a new tab.
  2. In the navigation pane, under Serverless, choose SAML authentication.
  3. Select Add SAML provider.
  4. Provide a recognizable name (for example, okta) and a description.
  5. Open a new tab and enter the copied metadata URL into your browser.

You should see the metadata for the Okta application.

  1. Take note of this metadata and copy it to your clipboard.
  2. On the OpenSearch Service console tab, enter this metadata in the Provide metadata from your IdP section.
  3. Under Additional settings, enter mygroup or the group attribute provided in the Okta configuration.
  4. Choose Create a SAML provider.

The SAML provider has now been created.

The following graphic gives a quick demonstration of setting up the SAML provider in OpenSearch Serverless via the preceding steps.

Update the data access policy

You need to configure the right permissions in the data access policies associated with your OpenSearch collection so your Okta group members can access the OpenSearch Dashboards endpoint.

  1. On the OpenSearch Serverless console, open your collection.
  2. Choose the data access policy associated with the collection in the Data Access section.
  3. Choose Edit.
  4. Choose Principals and Add a SAML principal.
  5. Select the SAML provider you created earlier and enter group/opensearch-serverless next to it.
  6. The OpenSearch Dashboards endpoint can be accessed by all group members. You can grant access to collections, indexes, or both.
  7. Choose Save.

Log in to OpenSearch Dashboards

Now that you have set permissions to access the dashboards, choose the Dashboards URL under the general information for the OpenSearch Serverless collection. This should take you to the website
https://collection-endpoint/_dashboards/

You will see a list with all the access options. Choose the SAML provider that you created (okta in this case) and log in using your Okta credentials. You will now be logged into OpenSearch Dashboards with the permissions that are part of the data access policy. You can perform searches or create visualizations from the dashboard.

Clean up

To avoid unwanted charges, delete the OpenSearch Serverless collection, data access policy, and SAML provider created as part of this demonstration.

Summary

In this post, you learned how to set up Okta as an IdP to access OpenSearch Dashboards using SAML. You also learned how to set up users and groups within Okta and configure their access to OpenSearch Dashboards. For more details, refer to SAML authentication for Amazon OpenSearch Serverless.

You can also refer to the Getting started with Amazon OpenSearch Serverless workshop to know more about OpenSearch Serverless.

If you have feedback about this post, submit it in the comments section. If you have questions about this post, start a new thread on the OpenSearch Service forum or contact AWS Support.


About the Authors

Aish Gunasekar is a Specialist Solutions architect with a focus on Amazon OpenSearch Service. Her passion at AWS is to help customers design highly scalable architectures and help them in their cloud adoption journey. Outside of work, she enjoys hiking and baking.

Prashant Agrawal is a Sr. Search Specialist Solutions Architect with Amazon OpenSearch Service. He works closely with customers to help them migrate their workloads to the cloud and helps existing customers fine-tune their clusters to achieve better performance and save on cost. Before joining AWS, he helped various customers use OpenSearch and Elasticsearch for their search and log analytics use cases. When not working, you can find him traveling and exploring new places. In short, he likes doing Eat → Travel → Repeat.

Configure cross-Region table access with the AWS Glue Catalog and AWS Lake Formation

Post Syndicated from Aarthi Srinivasan original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/configure-cross-region-table-access-with-the-aws-glue-catalog-and-aws-lake-formation/

Today’s modern data lakes span multiple accounts, AWS Regions, and lines of business in organizations. Companies also have employees and do business across multiple geographic regions and even around the world. It’s important that their data solution gives them the ability to share and access data securely and safely across Regions.

The AWS Glue Data Catalog and AWS Lake Formation recently announced support for cross-Region table access. This feature lets users query AWS Glue databases and tables in one Region from another Region using resource links, without copying the metadata in the Data Catalog or the data in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). A resource link is a Data Catalog object that is a link to a database or table.

The AWS Glue Data Catalog is a centralized repository of technical metadata that holds the information about your datasets in AWS, and can be queried using AWS analytics services such as Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and AWS Glue for Apache Spark. The Data Catalog is localized to every Region in an AWS account, requiring users to replicate the metadata and the source data in S3 buckets for cross-Region queries. With the newly launched feature for cross-Region table access, you can create a resource link in any Region pointing to a database or table of the source Region. With the resource link in the local Region, you can query the source Region’s tables from Athena, Amazon EMR, and AWS Glue ETL in the local Region.

You can use the cross-Region table access feature of the Data Catalog in combination with the permissions management and cross-account sharing capability of Lake Formation. Lake Formation is a fully managed service that makes it easy to build, secure, and manage data lakes. By using cross-Region access support for Data Catalog, together with governance provided by Lake Formation, organizations can discover and access data across Regions without spending time making copies. Some businesses might have restrictions to run their compute in certain Regions. Organizations that need to share their Data Catalog with businesses that have such restrictions can now create and share cross-Region resource links.

In this post, we walk you through configuring cross-Region database and table access in two scenarios. In the first scenario, we go through an example where a customer wants to access an AWS Glue database in Region A from Region B in the same account. In scenario two, we demonstrate cross-account and cross-Region access where a customer wants to share a database in Region A across accounts and access it from Region B of the recipient account.

Scenario 1: Same account use case

In this scenario, we walk you through the steps required to share a Data Catalog database from one Region to another Region within the same AWS account. For our illustrations, we have a sample dataset in an S3 bucket in the us-east-2 Region and have used an AWS Glue crawler to crawl and catalog the dataset into a database in the Data Catalog of the us-east-2 Region. We share this dataset to the us-west-2 Region. You can use any of your datasets to follow along. The following diagram illustrates the architecture for cross-Region sharing within the same AWS account.

Prerequisites

To set up cross-Region sharing of a Data Catalog database for scenario 1, we recommend the following prerequisites:

  • An AWS account that is not used for production use cases.
  • Lake Formation set up already in the account and a Lake Formation administrator role or a similar role to follow along with the instructions in this post. For example, we are using a data lake administrator role called LF-Admin. The LF-Admin role also has the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permission iam:PassRole on the AWS Glue crawler role. To learn more about setting up permissions for a data lake administrator, see Create a data lake administrator.
  • A sample database in the Data Catalog with a few tables. For example, our sample database is called salesdb_useast2 and has a set of eight tables, as shown in the following screenshot.

Set up permissions for us-east-2

Complete the following steps to configure permissions in the us-east-2 Region:

  1. Log in to the Lake Formation console and choose the Region where your database resides. In our example, it is us-east-2 Region.
  2. Grant SELECT and DESCRIBE permissions to the LF-Admin role on all tables of the database salesdb_useast2.
  3. You can confirm if permissions are working by querying the database and tables as the data lake administrator role from Athena.

Set up permissions for us-west-2

Complete the following steps to configure permissions in the us-west-2 Region:

  1. Choose the us-west-2 Region on the Lake Formation console.
  2. Add LF-Admin as a data lake administrator and grant Create database permission to LF-Admin.
  3. In the navigation pane, under Data catalog, select Databases.
  4. Choose Create database and select Resource link.
  5. Enter rl_salesdb_from_useast2 as the name for the resource link.
  6. For Shared database’s region, choose US East (Ohio).
  7. For Shared database, choose salesdb_useast2.
  8. Choose Create.

This creates a database resource link in us-west-2 pointing to the database in us-east-2.

You will notice the Shared resource owner region column populate as us-east-2 for the resource link details on the Databases page.

Because the LF-Admin role created the resource link rl_salesdb_from_useast2, the role has implicit permissions on the resource link. LF-Admin already has permissions to query the table in the us-east-2 Region. There is no need to add a Grant on target permission for LF-Admin. If you are granting permission to another user or role, you need to grant Describe permissions on the resource link rl_salesdb_from_useast2.

  1. Query the database using the resource link in Athena as LF-Admin.

In the preceding steps, we saw how to create a resource link in us-west-2 for a Data Catalog database in us-east-2. You can also create a resource link to the source database in any additional Region where the Data Catalog is available. You can run extract, transform, and load (ETL) scripts in Amazon EMR and AWS Glue by providing the additional Region parameter when referring to the database and table. See the API documentation for GetTable() and GetDatabase() for additional details.

Also, Data Catalog permissions for the database, tables, and resource links and the underlying Amazon S3 data permissions can be managed by IAM policies and S3 bucket policies instead of Lake Formation permissions. For more information, see Identity and access management for AWS Glue.

Scenario 2: Cross-account use case

In this scenario, we walk you through the steps required to share a Data Catalog database from one Region to another Region between two accounts: a producer account and a consumer account. To show an advanced use case, we host the source dataset in us-east-2 of account A and crawl it using an AWS Glue crawler in the Data Catalog in us-east-1. The data lake administrator in account A then shares the database and tables to account B using Lake Formation permissions. The data lake administrator in account B accepts the share in us-east-1 and creates resource links to query the tables from eu-west-1. The following diagram illustrates the architecture for cross-Region sharing between producer account A and consumer account B.

Prerequisites

To set up cross-Region sharing of a Data Catalog database for scenario 2, we recommend the following prerequisites:

  • Two AWS accounts that are not used for production use cases
  • Lake Formation administrator roles in both accounts
  • Lake Formation set up in both accounts with cross-account sharing version 3. For more details, refer documentation.
  • A sample database in the Data Catalog with a few tables

For our example, we continue to use the same dataset and the data lake administrator role LF-Admin for scenario 2.

Set up account A for cross-Region sharing

To set up account A, complete the following steps:

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console as the data lake administrator role.
  2. Register the S3 bucket in Lake Formation in us-east-1 with an IAM role that has access to the S3 bucket. See registering your S3 location for instructions.
  3. Set up and run an AWS Glue crawler to catalog the data in the us-east-2 S3 bucket to the Data Catalog database useast2data_salesdb in us-east-1. Refer to AWS Glue crawlers support cross-account crawling to support data mesh architecture for instructions.

The database, as shown in the following screenshot, has a set of eight tables.

  1. Grant SELECT and DESCRIBE along with grantable permissions on all tables of the database to account B.

  2. Grant DESCRIBE with grantable permissions on the database.
  3. Verify the granted permissions on the Data permissions page.
  4. Log out of account A.

Set up account B for cross-Region sharing

To set up account B, complete the following steps:

  1. Sign in as the data lake administrator on the Lake Formation console in us-east-1.

In our example, we have created the data lake administrator role LF-Admin, similar to previous administrator roles in account A and scenario 1.

  1. On the AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) console, review and accept the AWS RAM invites corresponding to the shared database and tables from account A.

The LF-Admin role can see the shared database useast2data_salesdb from the producer account. LF-Admin has access to the database and tables and so doesn’t need additional permissions on the shared database.

  1. You can grant DESCRIBE on the database and SELECT on All_Tables permissions to any additional IAM principals from the us-east-1 Region on this shared database.
  2. Open the Lake Formation console in eu-west-1 (or any Region where you have Lake Formation and Athena already set up).
  3. Choose Create database and create a resource link named rl_useast1db_crossaccount, pointing to the us-east-1 database useast2data_salesdb.

You can choose any Region on the Shared database’s region drop-down menu and choose the databases from those Regions.

Because we’re using the data lake administrator role LF-Admin, we can see all databases from all Regions in the consumer account’s Data Catalog. A data lake user with restricted permissions will be able to see only those databases for which they have permissions to.

  1. Because LF-Admin created the resource link, this role has permissions to use the resource link rl_useast1db_crossaccount. For additional IAM principals, grant DESCRIBE permissions on the database resource link rl_useast1db_crossaccount.
  2. You can now query the database and tables from Athena.

Considerations

Cross-Region queries involve Amazon S3 data transfer by the analytics services, such as Athena, Amazon EMR, and AWS Glue ETL. As a result, cross-Region queries can be slower and will incur higher transfer costs compared to queries in the same Region. Some analytics services such as AWS Glue jobs and Amazon EMR may require internet access when accessing cross-Region data from Amazon S3, depending on your VPC set up. Refer to Considerations and limitations for more considerations.

Conclusion

In this post, you saw examples of how to set up cross-Region resource links for a database in the same account and across two accounts. You also saw how to use cross-Region resource links to query in Athena. You can share selected tables from a database instead of sharing an entire database. With cross-Region sharing, you can create a resource link for the table using the Create table option.

There are two key things to remember when using the cross-Region table access feature:

  • Grant permissions on the source database or table from its source Region.
  • Grant permissions on the resource link from the Region it was created in.

That is, the original shared database or table is always available in the source Region, and resource links are created and shared in their local Region.

To get started, see Accessing tables across Regions. Share your comments on the post or contact your AWS account team for more details.


About the author

Aarthi Srinivasan is a Senior Big Data Architect with AWS Lake Formation. She likes building data lake solutions for AWS customers and partners. When not on the keyboard, she explores the latest science and technology trends and spends time with her family.

Estimating Scope 1 Carbon Footprint with Amazon Athena

Post Syndicated from Thomas Burns original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/estimating-scope-1-carbon-footprint-with-amazon-athena/

Today, more than 400 organizations have signed The Climate Pledge, a commitment to reach net-zero carbon by 2040. Some of the drivers that lead to setting explicit climate goals include customer demand, current and anticipated government relations, employee demand, investor demand, and sustainability as a competitive advantage. AWS customers are increasingly interested in ways to drive sustainability actions. In this blog, we will walk through how we can apply existing enterprise data to better understand and estimate Scope 1 carbon footprint using Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Athena, a serverless interactive analytics service that makes it easy to analyze data using standard SQL.

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHGP) provides standards for measuring and managing global warming impacts from an organization’s operations and value chain.

The greenhouse gases covered by the GHGP are the seven gases required by the UNFCCC/Kyoto Protocol (which is often called the “Kyoto Basket”). These gases are carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), the so-called F-gases (hydrofluorocarbons and perfluorocarbons), sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) nitrogen trifluoride (NF3). Each greenhouse gas is characterized by its global warming potential (GWP), which is determined by the gas’s greenhouse effect and its lifetime in the atmosphere. Since carbon dioxide (CO2) accounts for about 76 percent of total man-made greenhouse gas emissions, the global warming potential of greenhouse gases are measured relative to CO2, and are thus expressed as CO2-equivalent (CO2e).

The GHGP divides an organization’s emissions into three primary scopes:

  • Scope 1 – Direct greenhouse gas emissions (for example from burning fossil fuels)
  • Scope 2 – Indirect emissions from purchased energy (typically electricity)
  • Scope 3 – Indirect emissions from the value chain, including suppliers and customers

How do we estimate greenhouse gas emissions?

There are different methods to estimating GHG emissions that includes the Continuous Emissions Monitoring System (CEMS) Method, the Spend-Based Method, and the Consumption-Based Method.

Direct Measurement – CEMS Method

An organization can estimate its carbon footprint from stationary combustion sources by performing a direct measurement of carbon emissions using the CEMS method. This method requires continuously measuring the pollutants emitted in exhaust gases from each emissions source using equipment such as gas analyzers, gas samplers, gas conditioning equipment (to remove particulate matter, water vapor and other contaminants), plumbing, actuated valves, Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) and other controlling software and hardware. Although this approach may yield useful results, CEMS requires specific sensing equipment for each greenhouse gas to be measured, requires supporting hardware and software, and is typically more suitable for Environment Health and Safety applications of centralized emission sources. More information on CEMS is available here.

Spend-Based Method

Because the financial accounting function is mature and often already audited, many organizations choose to use financial controls as a foundation for their carbon footprint accounting. The Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment (EIO LCA) method is a spend-based method that combines expenditure data with monetary-based emission factors to estimate the emissions produced. The emission factors are published by the U.S. Environment Protection Agency (EPA) and other peer-reviewed academic and government sources. With this method, you can multiply the amount of money spent on a business activity by the emission factor to produce the estimated carbon footprint of the activity.

For example, you can convert the amount your company spends on truck transport to estimated kilograms (KG) of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e) emitted as shown below.

Estimated Carbon Footprint = Amount of money spent on truck transport * Emission Factor [1]

Although these computations are very easy to make from general ledgers or other financial records, they are most valuable for initial estimates or for reporting minor sources of greenhouse gases. As the only user-provided input is the amount spent on an activity, EIO LCA methods aren’t useful for modeling improved efficiency. This is because the only way to reduce EIO-calculated emissions is to reduce spending. Therefore, as a company continues to improve its carbon footprint efficiency, other methods of estimating carbon footprint are often more desirable.

Consumption-Based Method

From either Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems or electronic copies of fuel bills, it’s straightforward to determine the amount of fuel an organization procures during a reporting period. Fuel-based emission factors are available from a variety of sources such as the US Environmental Protection Agency and commercially-licensed databases. Multiplying the amount of fuel procured by the emission factor yields an estimate of the CO2e emitted through combustion. This method is often used for estimating the carbon footprint of stationary emissions (for instance backup generators for data centers or fossil fuel ovens for industrial processes).

If for a particular month an enterprise consumed a known amount of motor gasoline for stationary combustion, the Scope 1 CO2e footprint of the stationary gasoline combustion can be estimated in the following manner:

Estimated Carbon Footprint = Amount of Fuel Consumed * Stationary Combustion Emission Factor[2]

Organizations may estimate their carbon emissions by using existing data found in fuel and electricity bills, ERP data, and relevant emissions factors, which are then consolidated in to a data lake. Using existing analytics tools such as Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight an organization can gain insight into its estimated carbon footprint.

The data architecture diagram below shows an example of how you could use AWS services to calculate and visualize an organization’s estimated carbon footprint.

Analytics Architecture

Customers have the flexibility to choose the services in each stage of the data pipeline based on their use case. For example, in the data ingestion phase, depending on the existing data requirements, there are many options to ingest data into the data lake such as using the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS DataSync, or AWS Database Migration Service.

Example of calculating a Scope 1 stationary emissions footprint with AWS services

Let’s assume you burned 100 standard cubic feet (scf) of natural gas in an oven. Using the US EPA emission factors for stationary emissions we can estimate the carbon footprint associated with the burning. In this case the emission factor is 0.05449555 Kg CO2e /scf.[3]

Amazon S3 is ideal for building a data lake on AWS to store disparate data sources in a single repository, due to its virtually unlimited scalability and high durability. Athena, a serverless interactive query service, allows the analysis of data directly from Amazon S3 using standard SQL without having to load the data into Athena or run complex extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes. Amazon QuickSight supports creating visualizations of different data sources, including Amazon S3 and Athena, and the flexibility to use custom SQL to extract a subset of the data. QuickSight dashboards can provide you with insights (such as your company’s estimated carbon footprint) quickly, and also provide the ability to generate standardized reports for your business and sustainability users.

In this example, the sample data is stored in a file system and uploaded to Amazon S3 using the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) as shown in the following architecture diagram. AWS recommends creating AWS resources and managing CLI access in accordance with the Best Practices for Security, Identity, & Compliance guidance.

The AWS CLI command below demonstrates how to upload the sample data folders into the S3 target location.

aws s3 cp /path/to/local/file s3://bucket-name/path/to/destination

The snapshot of the S3 console shows two newly added folders that contains the files.

S3 Bucket Overview of Files

To create new table schemas, we start by running the following script for the gas utilization table in the Athena query editor using Hive DDL. The script defines the data format, column details, table properties, and the location of the data in S3.

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE `gasutilization`(
`fuel_id` int,
`month` string,
`year` int,
`usage_therms` float,
`usage_scf` float,
`g-nr1_schedule_charge` float,
`accountfee` float,
`gas_ppps` float,
`netcharge` float,
`taxpercentage` float,
`totalcharge` float)
ROW FORMAT DELIMITED
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','
STORED AS INPUTFORMAT
'org.apache.hadoop.mapred.TextInputFormat'
OUTPUTFORMAT
'org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.io.HiveIgnoreKeyTextOutputFormat'
LOCATION
's3://<bucketname>/Scope 1 Sample Data/gasutilization'
TBLPROPERTIES (
'classification'='csv',
'skip.header.line.count'='1')

Athena Hive DDLThe script below shows another example of using Hive DDL to generate the table schema for the gas emission factor data.

CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE `gas_emission_factor`(
`fuel_id` int,
`gas_name` string,
`emission_factor` float)
ROW FORMAT DELIMITED
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','
STORED AS INPUTFORMAT
'org.apache.hadoop.mapred.TextInputFormat'
OUTPUTFORMAT
'org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.io.HiveIgnoreKeyTextOutputFormat'
LOCATION
's3://<bucketname>/Scope 1 Sample Data/gas_emission_factor'
TBLPROPERTIES (
'classification'='csv',
'skip.header.line.count'='1')

After creating the table schema in Athena, we run the below query against the gas utilization table that includes details of gas bills to show the gas utilization and the associated charges, such as gas public purpose program surcharge (PPPS) and total charges after taxes for the year of 2020:

SELECT * FROM "gasutilization" where year = 2020;

Athena gas utilization overview by month

We are also able to analyze the emission factor data showing the different fuel types and their corresponding CO2e emission as shown in the screenshot.

athena co2e emission factor

With the emission factor and the gas utilization data, we can run the following query below to get an estimated Scope 1 carbon footprint alongside other details. In this query, we joined the gas utilization table and the gas emission factor table on fuel id and multiplied the gas usage in standard cubic foot (scf) by the emission factor to get the estimated CO2e impact. We also selected the month, year, total charge, and gas usage measured in therms and scf, as these are often attributes that are of interest for customers.

SELECT "gasutilization"."usage_scf" * "gas_emission_factor"."emission_factor" 
AS "estimated_CO2e_impact", 
"gasutilization"."month", 
"gasutilization"."year", 
"gasutilization"."totalcharge", 
"gasutilization"."usage_therms", 
"gasutilization"."usage_scf" 
FROM "gasutilization" 
JOIN "gas_emission_factor" 
on "gasutilization"."fuel_id"="gas_emission_factor"."fuel_id";

athena join

Lastly, Amazon QuickSight allows visualization of different data sources, including Amazon S3 and Athena, and the flexibility to use custom SQL to get a subset of the data. The following is an example of a QuickSight dashboard showing the gas utilization, gas charges, and estimated carbon footprint across different years.

QuickSight sample dashboard

We have just estimated the Scope 1 carbon footprint for one source of stationary combustion. If we were to do the same process for all sources of stationary and mobile emissions (with different emissions factors) and add the results together, we could roll up an accurate estimate of our Scope 1 carbon emissions for the entire business by only utilizing native AWS services and our own data. A similar process will yield an estimate of Scope 2 emissions, with grid carbon intensity in the place of Scope 1 emission factors.

Summary

This blog discusses how organizations can use existing data in disparate sources to build a data architecture to gain better visibility into Scope 1 greenhouse gas emissions. With Athena, S3, and QuickSight, organizations can now estimate their stationary emissions carbon footprint in a repeatable way by applying the consumption-based method to convert fuel utilization into an estimated carbon footprint.

Other approaches available on AWS include Carbon Accounting on AWS, Sustainability Insights Framework, Carbon Data Lake on AWS, and general guidance detailed at the AWS Carbon Accounting Page.

If you are interested in information on estimating your organization’s carbon footprint with AWS, please reach out to your AWS account team and check out AWS Sustainability Solutions.

References

  1. An example from page four of Amazon’s Carbon Methodology document illustrates this concept.
    Amount spent on truck transport: $100,000
    EPA Emission Factor: 1.556 KG CO2e /dollar of truck transport
    Estimated CO₂e emission: $100,000 * 1.556 KG CO₂e/dollar of truck transport = 155,600 KG of CO2e ↑
  2. For example,
    Gasoline consumed: 1,000 US Gallons
    EPA Emission Factor: 8.81 Kg of CO2e /gallon of gasoline combusted
    Estimated CO2e emission = 1,000 US Gallons * 8.81 Kg of CO2e per gallon of gasoline consumed= 8,810 Kg of CO2e.
    EPA Emissions Factor for stationary emissions of motor gasoline is 8.78 kg CO2 plus .38 grams of CH4, plus .08 g of N2O.
    Combining these emission factors using 100-year global warming potential for each gas (CH4:25 and N2O:298) gives us Combined Emission Factor = 8.78 kg + 25*.00038 kg + 298 *.00008 kg = 8.81 kg of CO2e per gallon.↑
  3. The Emission factor per scf is 0.05444 kg of CO2 plus 0.00103 g of CH4 plus 0.0001 g of N2O. To get this in terms of CO2e we need to multiply the emission factor of the other two gases by their global warming potentials (GWP). The 100-year GWP for CH4  and N2O are 25 and 298 respectively. Emission factors and GWPs come from the US EPA website. ↑


About the Authors


Thomas Burns
, SCR, CISSP is a Principal Sustainability Strategist and Principal Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. Thomas supports manufacturing and industrial customers world-wide. Thomas’s focus is using the cloud to help companies reduce their environmental impact both inside and outside of IT.

Aileen Zheng is a Solutions Architect supporting US Federal Civilian Sciences customers at Amazon Web Services (AWS). She partners with customers to provide technical guidance on enterprise cloud adoption and strategy and helps with building well-architected solutions. She is also very passionate about data analytics and machine learning. In her free time, you’ll find Aileen doing pilates, taking her dog Mumu out for a hike, or hunting down another good spot for food! You’ll also see her contributing to projects to support diversity and women in technology.

Empower your Jira data in a data lake with Amazon AppFlow and AWS Glue

Post Syndicated from Tom Romano original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/empower-your-jira-data-in-a-data-lake-with-amazon-appflow-and-aws-glue/

In the world of software engineering and development, organizations use project management tools like Atlassian Jira Cloud. Managing projects with Jira leads to rich datasets, which can provide historical and predictive insights about project and development efforts.

Although Jira Cloud provides reporting capability, loading this data into a data lake will facilitate enrichment with other business data, as well as support the use of business intelligence (BI) tools and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications. Companies often take a data lake approach to their analytics, bringing data from many different systems into one place to simplify how the analytics are done.

This post shows you how to use Amazon AppFlow and AWS Glue to create a fully automated data ingestion pipeline that will synchronize your Jira data into your data lake. Amazon AppFlow provides software as a service (SaaS) integration with Jira Cloud to load the data into your AWS account. AWS Glue is a serverless data discovery, load, and transformation service that will prepare data for consumption in BI and AI/ML activities. Additionally, this post strives to achieve a low-code and serverless solution for operational efficiency and cost optimization, and the solution supports incremental loading for cost optimization.

Solution overview

This solution uses Amazon AppFlow to retrieve data from the Jira Cloud. The data is synchronized to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket using an initial full download and subsequent incremental downloads of changes. When new data arrives in the S3 bucket, an AWS Step Functions workflow is triggered that orchestrates extract, transform, and load (ETL) activities using AWS Glue crawlers and AWS Glue DataBrew. The data is then available in the AWS Glue Data Catalog and can be queried by services such as Amazon Athena, Amazon QuickSight, and Amazon Redshift Spectrum. The solution is completely automated and serverless, resulting in low operational overhead. When this setup is complete, your Jira data will be automatically ingested and kept up to date in your data lake!

The following diagram illustrates the solution architecture.

The Jira Appflow Architecture is shown. The Jira Cloud data is retrieved by Amazon AppFlow and is stored in Amazon S3. This triggers an Amazon EventBridge event that runs an AWS Step Functions workflow. The workflow uses AWS Glue to catalog and transform the data, The data is then queried with QuickSight.

The Step Functions workflow orchestrates the following ETL activities, resulting in two tables:

  • An AWS Glue crawler collects all downloads into a single AWS Glue table named jira_raw. This table is comprised of a mix of full and incremental downloads from Jira, with many versions of the same records representing changes over time.
  • A DataBrew job prepares the data for reporting by unpacking key-value pairs in the fields, as well as removing depreciated records as they are updated in subsequent change data captures. This reporting-ready data will available in an AWS Glue table named jira_data.

The following figure shows the Step Functions workflow.

A diagram represents the AWS Step Functions workflow. It contains the steps to run an AWS Crawler, wait for it's completion, and then run a AWS Glue DataBrew data transformation job.

Prerequisites

This solution requires the following:

  • Administrative access to your Jira Cloud instance, and an associated Jira Cloud developer account.
  • An AWS account and a login with access to the AWS Management Console. Your login will need AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions to create and access the resources in your AWS account.
  • Basic knowledge of AWS and working knowledge of Jira administration.

Configure the Jira Instance

After logging in to your Jira Cloud instance, you establish a Jira project with associated epics and issues to download into a data lake. If you’re starting with a new Jira instance, it helps to have at least one project with a sampling of epics and issues for the initial data download, because it allows you to create an initial dataset without errors or missing fields. Note that you may have multiple projects as well.

An image show a Jira Cloud example, with several issues arranged in a Kansan board.

After you have established your Jira project and populated it with epics and issues, ensure you also have access to the Jira developer portal. In later steps, you use this developer portal to establish authentication and permissions for the Amazon AppFlow connection.

Provision resources with AWS CloudFormation

For the initial setup, you launch an AWS CloudFormation stack to create an S3 bucket to store data, IAM roles for data access, and the AWS Glue crawler and Data Catalog components. Complete the following steps:

  1. Sign in to your AWS account.
  2. Click Launch Stack:
  3. For Stack name, enter a name for the stack (the default is aws-blog-jira-datalake-with-AppFlow).
  4. For GlueDatabaseName, enter a unique name for the Data Catalog database to hold the Jira data table metadata (the default is jiralake).
  5. For InitialRunFlag, choose Setup. This mode will scan all data and disable the change data capture (CDC) features of the stack. (Because this is the initial load, the stack needs an initial data load before you configure CDC in later steps.)
  6. Under Capabilities and transforms, select the acknowledgement check boxes to allow IAM resources to be created within your AWS account.
  7. Review the parameters and choose Create stack to deploy the CloudFormation stack. This process will take around 5–10 minutes to complete.
    An image depicts the Amazon CloudFormation configuration steps, including setting a stack name, setting parameters to "jiralake" and "Setup" mode, and checking all IAM capabilities requested.
  8. After the stack is deployed, review the Outputs tab for the stack and collect the following values to use when you set up Amazon AppFlow:
    • Amazon AppFlow destination bucket (o01AppFlowBucket)
    • Amazon AppFlow destination bucket path (o02AppFlowPath)
    • Role for Amazon AppFlow Jira connector (o03AppFlowRole)
      An image demonstrating the Amazon Cloudformation "Outputs" tab, highlighting the values to add to the Amazon AppFlow configuration.

Configure Jira Cloud

Next, you configure your Jira Cloud instance for access by Amazon AppFlow. For full instructions, refer to Jira Cloud connector for Amazon AppFlow. The following steps summarize these instructions and discuss the specific configuration to enable OAuth in the Jira Cloud:

  1. Open the Jira developer portal.
  2. Create the OAuth 2 integration from the developer application console by choosing Create an OAuth 2.0 Integration. This will provide a login mechanism for AppFlow.
  3. Enable fine-grained permissions. See Recommended scopes for the permission settings to grant AppFlow appropriate access to your Jira instance.
  4. Add the following permission scopes to your OAuth app:
    1. manage:jira-configuration
    2. read:field-configuration:jira
  5. Under Authorization, set the Call Back URL to return to Amazon AppFlow with the URL https://us-east-1.console.aws.amazon.com/AppFlow/oauth.
  6. Under Settings, note the client ID and secret to use in later steps to set up authentication from Amazon AppFlow.

Create the Amazon AppFlow Jira Cloud connection

In this step, you configure Amazon AppFlow to run a one-time full data fetch of all your data, establishing the initial data lake:

  1. On the Amazon AppFlow console, choose Connectors in the navigation pane.
  2. Search for the Jira Cloud connector.
  3. Choose Create flow on the connector tile to create the connection to your Jira instance.
    An image of Amazon AppFlor, showing the search for the "Jira Cloud" connector.
  4. For Flow name, enter a name for the flow (for example, JiraLakeFlow).
  5. Leave the Data encryption setting as the default.
  6. Choose Next.
    The Amazon AppFlow Jira connector configuration, showing the Flow name set to "JiraLakeFlow" and clicking the "next" button.
  7. For Source name, keep the default of Jira Cloud.
  8. Choose Create new connection under Jira Cloud connection.
  9. In the Connect to Jira Cloud section, enter the values for Client ID, Client secret, and Jira Cloud Site that you collected earlier. This provides the authentication from AppFlow to Jira Cloud.
  10. For Connection Name, enter a connection name (for example, JiraLakeCloudConnection).
  11. Choose Connect. You will be prompted to allow your OAuth app to access your Atlassian account to verify authentication.
    An image of the Amazon AppFlow conflagration, reflecting the completion of the prior steps.
  12. In the Authorize App window that pops up, choose Accept.
  13. With the connection created, return to the Configure flow section on the Amazon AppFlow console.
  14. For API version, choose V2 to use the latest Jira query API.
  15. For Jira Cloud object, choose Issue to query and download all issues and associated details.
    An image of the Amazon AppFlow configuration, reflecting the completion of the prior steps.
  16. For Destination Name in the Destination Details section, choose Amazon S3.
  17. For Bucket details, choose the S3 bucket name that matches the Amazon AppFlow destination bucket value that you collected from the outputs of the CloudFormation stack.
  18. Enter the Amazon AppFlow destination bucket path to complete the full S3 path. This will send the Jira data to the S3 bucket created by the CloudFormation script.
  19. Leave Catalog your data in the AWS Glue Data Catalog unselected. The CloudFormation script uses an AWS Glue crawler to update the Data Catalog in a different manner, grouping all the downloads into a common table, so we disable the update here.
  20. For File format settings, select Parquet format and select Preserve source data types in Parquet output. Parquet is a columnar format to optimize subsequent querying.
  21. Select Add a timestamp to the file name for Filename preference. This will allow you to easily find data files downloaded at a specific date and time.
    An image of the Amazon AppFlow configuration, reflecting the completion of the prior steps.
  22. For now, select Run on Demand for the Flow trigger to run the full load flow manually. You will schedule downloads in a later step when implementing CDC.
  23. Choose Next.
    An image of the Amazon AppFlow Flow Trigger configuration, reflecting the completion of the prior steps.
  24. On the Map data fields page, select Manually map fields.
  25. For Source to destination field mapping, choose the drop-down box under Source field name and select Map all fields directly. This will bring down all fields as they are received, because we will instead implement data preparation in later steps.
    An image of the Amazon AppFlow configuration, reflecting the completion of steps 24 & 25.
  26. Under Partition and aggregation settings, you can set up the partitions in a way that works for your use case. For this example, we use a daily partition, so select Date and time and choose Daily.
  27. For Aggregation settings, leave it as the default of Don’t aggregate.
  28. Choose Next.
    An image of the Amazon AppFlow configuration, reflecting the completion of steps 26-28.
  29. On the Add filters page, you can create filters to only download specific data. For this example, you download all the data, so choose Next.
  30. Review and choose Create flow.
  31. When the flow is created, choose Run flow to start the initial data seeding. After some time, you should receive a banner indicating the run finished successfully.
    An image of the Amazon AppFlow configuration, reflecting the completion of step 31.

Review seed data

At this stage in the process, you now have data in your S3 environment. When new data files are created in the S3 bucket, it will automatically run an AWS Glue crawler to catalog the new data. You can see if it’s complete by reviewing the Step Functions state machine for a Succeeded run status. There is a link to the state machine on the CloudFormation stack’s Resources tab, which will redirect you to the Step Functions state machine.

A image showing the CloudFormation resources tab of the stack, with a link to the AWS Step Functions workflow.

When the state machine is complete, it’s time to review the raw Jira data with Athena. The database is as you specified in the CloudFormation stack (jiralake by default), and the table name is jira_raw. If you kept the default AWS Glue database name of jiralake, the Athena SQL is as follows:

SELECT * FROM "jiralake"."jira_raw" limit 10;

If you explore the data, you’ll notice that most of the data you would want to work with is actually packed into a column called fields. This means the data is not available as columns in your Athena queries, making it harder to select, filter, and sort individual fields within an Athena SQL query. This will be addressed in the next steps.

An image demonstrating the Amazon Athena query SELECT * FROM "jiralake"."jira_raw" limit 10;

Set up CDC and unpack the fields columns

To add the ongoing CDC and reformat the data for analytics, we introduce a DataBrew job to transform the data and filter to the most recent version of each record as changes come in. You can do this by updating the CloudFormation stack with a flag that includes the CDC and data transformation steps.

  1. On the AWS CloudFormation console, return to the stack.
  2. Choose Update.
  3. Select Use current template and choose Next.
    An image showing Amazon CloudFormation, with steps 1-3 complete.
  4. For SetupOrCDC, choose CDC, then choose Next. This will enable both the CDC steps and the data transformation steps for the Jira data.
    An image showing Amazon CloudFormation, with step 4 complete.
  5. Continue choosing Next until you reach the Review section.
  6. Select I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources, then choose Submit.
    An image showing Amazon CloudFormation, with step 5-6 complete.
  7. Return to the Amazon AppFlow console and open your flow.
  8. On the Actions menu, choose Edit flow. We will now edit the flow trigger to run an incremental load on a periodic basis.
  9. Select Run flow on schedule.
  10. Configure the desired repeats, as well as start time and date. For this example, we choose Daily for Repeats and enter 1 for the number of days you’ll have the flow trigger. For Starting at, enter 01:00.
  11. Select Incremental transfer for Transfer mode.
  12. Choose Updated on the drop-down menu so that changes will be captured based on when the records were updated.
  13. Choose Save. With these settings in our example, the run will happen nightly at 1:00 AM.
    An image showing the Flow Trigger, with incremental transfer selected.

Review the analytics data

When the next incremental load occurs that results in new data, the Step Functions workflow will start the DataBrew job and populate a new staged analytical data table named jira_data in your Data Catalog database. If you don’t want to wait, you can trigger the Step Functions workflow manually.

The DataBrew job performs data transformation and filtering tasks. The job unpacks the key-values from the Jira JSON data and the raw Jira data, resulting in a tabular data schema that facilitates use with BI and AI/ML tools. As Jira items are changed, the changed item’s data is resent, resulting in multiple versions of an item in the raw data feed. The DataBrew job filters the raw data feed so that the resulting data table only contains the most recent version of each item. You could enhance this DataBrew job to further customize the data for your needs, such as renaming the generic Jira custom field names to reflect their business meaning.

When the Step Functions workflow is complete, we can query the data in Athena again using the following query:

SELECT * FROM "jiralake"."jira_data" limit 10;

You can see that in our transformed jira_data table, the nested JSON fields are broken out into their own columns for each field. You will also notice that we’ve filtered out obsolete records that have been superseded by more recent record updates in later data loads so the data is fresh. If you want to rename custom fields, remove columns, or restructure what comes out of the nested JSON, you can modify the DataBrew recipe to accomplish this. At this point, the data is ready to be used by your analytics tools, such as Amazon QuickSight.

An image demonstrating the Amazon Athena query SELECT * FROM "jiralake"."jira_data" limit 10;

Clean up

If you would like to discontinue this solution, you can remove it with the following steps:

  1. On the Amazon AppFlow console, deactivate the flow for Jira, and optionally delete it.
  2. On the Amazon S3 console, select the S3 bucket for the stack, and empty the bucket to delete the existing data.
  3. On the AWS CloudFormation console, delete the CloudFormation stack that you deployed.

Conclusion

In this post, we created a serverless incremental data load process for Jira that will synchronize data while handling custom fields using Amazon AppFlow, AWS Glue, and Step Functions. The approach uses Amazon AppFlow to incrementally load the data into Amazon S3. We then use AWS Glue and Step Functions to manage the extraction of the Jira custom fields and load them in a format to be queried by analytics services such as Athena, QuickSight, or Redshift Spectrum, or AI/ML services like Amazon SageMaker.

To learn more about AWS Glue and DataBrew, refer to Getting started with AWS Glue DataBrew. With DataBrew, you can take the sample data transformation in this project and customize the output to meet your specific needs. This could include renaming columns, creating additional fields, and more.

To learn more about Amazon AppFlow, refer to Getting started with Amazon AppFlow. Note that Amazon AppFlow supports integrations with many SaaS applications in addition to the Jira Cloud.

To learn more about orchestrating flows with Step Functions, see Create a Serverless Workflow with AWS Step Functions and AWS Lambda. The workflow could be enhanced to load the data into a data warehouse, such as Amazon Redshift, or trigger a refresh of a QuickSight dataset for analytics and reporting.

In future posts, we will cover how to unnest parent-child relationships within the Jira data using Athena and how to visualize the data using QuickSight.


About the Authors

Tom Romano is a Sr. Solutions Architect for AWS World Wide Public Sector from Tampa, FL, and assists GovTech and EdTech customers as they create new solutions that are cloud native, event driven, and serverless. He is an enthusiastic Python programmer for both application development and data analytics, and is an Analytics Specialist. In his free time, Tom flies remote control model airplanes and enjoys vacationing with his family around Florida and the Caribbean.

Shane Thompson is a Sr. Solutions Architect based out of San Luis Obispo, California, working with AWS Startups. He works with customers who use AI/ML in their business model and is passionate about democratizing AI/ML so that all customers can benefit from it. In his free time, Shane loves to spend time with his family and travel around the world.

A side-by-side comparison of Apache Spark and Apache Flink for common streaming use cases

Post Syndicated from Deepthi Mohan original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/a-side-by-side-comparison-of-apache-spark-and-apache-flink-for-common-streaming-use-cases/

Apache Flink and Apache Spark are both open-source, distributed data processing frameworks used widely for big data processing and analytics. Spark is known for its ease of use, high-level APIs, and the ability to process large amounts of data. Flink shines in its ability to handle processing of data streams in real-time and low-latency stateful computations. Both support a variety of programming languages, scalable solutions for handling large amounts of data, and a wide range of connectors. Historically, Spark started out as a batch-first framework and Flink began as a streaming-first framework.

In this post, we share a comparative study of streaming patterns that are commonly used to build stream processing applications, how they can be solved using Spark (primarily Spark Structured Streaming) and Flink, and the minor variations in their approach. Examples cover code snippets in Python and SQL for both frameworks across three major themes: data preparation, data processing, and data enrichment. If you are a Spark user looking to solve your stream processing use cases using Flink, this post is for you. We do not intend to cover the choice of technology between Spark and Flink because it’s important to evaluate both frameworks for your specific workload and how the choice fits in your architecture; rather, this post highlights key differences for use cases that both these technologies are commonly considered for.

Apache Flink offers layered APIs that offer different levels of expressiveness and control and are designed to target different types of use cases. The three layers of API are Process Functions (also known as the Stateful Stream Processing API), DataStream, and Table and SQL. The Stateful Stream Processing API requires writing verbose code but offers the most control over time and state, which are core concepts in stateful stream processing. The DataStream API supports Java, Scala, and Python and offers primitives for many common stream processing operations, as well as a balance between code verbosity or expressiveness and control. The Table and SQL APIs are relational APIs that offer support for Java, Scala, Python, and SQL. They offer the highest abstraction and intuitive, SQL-like declarative control over data streams. Flink also allows seamless transition and switching across these APIs. To learn more about Flink’s layered APIs, refer to layered APIs.

Apache Spark Structured Streaming offers the Dataset and DataFrames APIs, which provide high-level declarative streaming APIs to represent static, bounded data as well as streaming, unbounded data. Operations are supported in Scala, Java, Python, and R. Spark has a rich function set and syntax with simple constructs for selection, aggregation, windowing, joins, and more. You can also use the Streaming Table API to read tables as streaming DataFrames as an extension to the DataFrames API. Although it’s hard to draw direct parallels between Flink and Spark across all stream processing constructs, at a very high level, we could say Spark Structured Streaming APIs are equivalent to Flink’s Table and SQL APIs. Spark Structured Streaming, however, does not yet (at the time of this writing) offer an equivalent to the lower-level APIs in Flink that offer granular control of time and state.

Both Flink and Spark Structured Streaming (referenced as Spark henceforth) are evolving projects. The following table provides a simple comparison of Flink and Spark capabilities for common streaming primitives (as of this writing).

. Flink Spark
Row-based processing Yes Yes
User-defined functions Yes Yes
Fine-grained access to state Yes, via DataStream and low-level APIs No
Control when state eviction occurs Yes, via DataStream and low-level APIs No
Flexible data structures for state storage and querying Yes, via DataStream and low-level APIs No
Timers for processing and stateful operations Yes, via low level APIs No

In the following sections, we cover the greatest common factors so that we can showcase how Spark users can relate to Flink and vice versa. To learn more about Flink’s low-level APIs, refer to Process Function. For the sake of simplicity, we cover the four use cases in this post using the Flink Table API. We use a combination of Python and SQL for an apples-to-apples comparison with Spark.

Data preparation

In this section, we compare data preparation methods for Spark and Flink.

Reading data

We first look at the simplest ways to read data from a data stream. The following sections assume the following schema for messages:

symbol: string,
price: int,
timestamp: timestamp,
company_info:
{
    name: string,
    employees_count: int
}

Reading data from a source in Spark Structured Streaming

In Spark Structured Streaming, we use a streaming DataFrame in Python that directly reads the data in JSON format:

spark = ...  # spark session

# specify schema
stock_ticker_schema = ...

# Create a streaming DataFrame
df = spark.readStream \
    .format("kafka") \
    .option("kafka.bootstrap.servers", "mybroker1:port") \
    .option("topic", "stock_ticker") \
    .load()
    .select(from_json(col("value"), stock_ticker_schema).alias("ticker_data")) \
    .select(col("ticker_data.*"))

Note that we have to supply a schema object that captures our stock ticker schema (stock_ticker_schema). Compare this to the approach for Flink in the next section.

Reading data from a source using Flink Table API

For Flink, we use the SQL DDL statement CREATE TABLE. You can specify the schema of the stream just like you would any SQL table. The WITH clause allows us to specify the connector to the data stream (Kafka in this case), the associated properties for the connector, and data format specifications. See the following code:

# Create table using DDL

CREATE TABLE stock_ticker (
  symbol string,
  price INT,
  timestamp TIMESTAMP(3),
  company_info STRING,
  WATERMARK FOR timestamp AS timestamp - INTERVAL '3' MINUTE
) WITH (
 'connector' = 'kafka',
 'topic' = 'stock_ticker',
 'properties.bootstrap.servers' = 'mybroker1:port',
 'properties.group.id' = 'testGroup',
 'format' = 'json',
 'json.fail-on-missing-field' = 'false',
 'json.ignore-parse-errors' = 'true'
)

JSON flattening

JSON flattening is the process of converting a nested or hierarchical JSON object into a flat, single-level structure. This converts multiple levels of nesting into an object where all the keys and values are at the same level. Keys are combined using a delimiter such as a period (.) or underscore (_) to denote the original hierarchy. JSON flattening is useful when you need to work with a more simplified format. In both Spark and Flink, nested JSONs can be complicated to work with and may need additional processing or user-defined functions to manipulate. Flattened JSONs can simplify processing and improve performance due to reduced computational overhead, especially with operations like complex joins, aggregations, and windowing. In addition, flattened JSONs can help in easier debugging and troubleshooting data processing pipelines because there are fewer levels of nesting to navigate.

JSON flattening in Spark Structured Streaming

JSON flattening in Spark Structured Streaming requires you to use the select method and specify the schema that you need flattened. JSON flattening in Spark Structured Streaming involves specifying the nested field name that you’d like surfaced to the top-level list of fields. In the following example, company_info is a nested field and within company_info, there’s a field called company_name. With the following query, we’re flattening company_info.name to company_name:

stock_ticker_df = ...  # Streaming DataFrame w/ schema shown above

stock_ticker_df.select("symbol", "timestamp", "price", "company_info.name" as "company_name")

JSON flattening in Flink

In Flink SQL, you can use the JSON_VALUE function. Note that you can use this function only in Flink versions equal to or greater than 1.14. See the following code:

SELECT
   symbol,
   timestamp,
   price,
   JSON_VALUE(company_info, 'lax $.name' DEFAULT NULL ON EMPTY) AS company_name
FROM
   stock_ticker

The term lax in the preceding query has to do with JSON path expression handling in Flink SQL. For more information, refer to System (Built-in) Functions.

Data processing

Now that you have read the data, we can look at a few common data processing patterns.

Deduplication

Data deduplication in stream processing is crucial for maintaining data quality and ensuring consistency. It enhances efficiency by reducing the strain on the processing from duplicate data and helps with cost savings on storage and processing.

Spark Streaming deduplication query

The following code snippet is related to a Spark Streaming DataFrame named stock_ticker. The code performs an operation to drop duplicate rows based on the symbol column. The dropDuplicates method is used to eliminate duplicate rows in a DataFrame based on one or more columns.

stock_ticker = ...  # Streaming DataFrame w/ schema shown above

stock_ticker.dropDuplicates("symbol")

Flink deduplication query

The following code shows the Flink SQL equivalent to deduplicate data based on the symbol column. The query retrieves the first row for each distinct value in the symbol column from the stock_ticker stream, based on the ascending order of proctime:

SELECT symbol, timestamp, price
FROM (
  SELECT *,
    ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY symbol ORDER BY proctime ASC) AS row_num
  FROM stock_ticker)
WHERE row_num = 1

Windowing

Windowing in streaming data is a fundamental construct to process data within specifications. Windows commonly have time bounds, number of records, or other criteria. These time bounds bucketize continuous unbounded data streams into manageable chunks called windows for processing. Windows help in analyzing data and gaining insights in real time while maintaining processing efficiency. Analyses or operations are performed on constantly updating streaming data within a window.

There are two common time-based windows used both in Spark Streaming and Flink that we will detail in this post: tumbling and sliding windows. A tumbling window is a time-based window that is a fixed size and doesn’t have any overlapping intervals. A sliding window is a time-based window that is a fixed size and moves forward in fixed intervals that can be overlapping.

Spark Streaming tumbling window query

The following is a Spark Streaming tumbling window query with a window size of 10 minutes:

stock_ticker = ...  # Streaming DataFrame w/ schema shown above

# Get max stock price in tumbling window
# of size 10 minutes
visitsByWindowAndUser = visits
   .withWatermark("timestamp", "3 minutes")
   .groupBy(
      window(stock_ticker.timestamp, "10 minutes"),
      stock_ticker.symbol)
   .max(stock_ticker.price)

Flink Streaming tumbling window query

The following is an equivalent tumbling window query in Flink with a window size of 10 minutes:

SELECT symbol, MAX(price)
  FROM TABLE(
    TUMBLE(TABLE stock_ticker, DESCRIPTOR(timestamp), INTERVAL '10' MINUTES))
  GROUP BY ticker;

Spark Streaming sliding window query

The following is a Spark Streaming sliding window query with a window size of 10 minutes and slide interval of 5 minutes:

stock_ticker = ...  # Streaming DataFrame w/ schema shown above

# Get max stock price in sliding window
# of size 10 minutes and slide interval of size
# 5 minutes

visitsByWindowAndUser = visits
   .withWatermark("timestamp", "3 minutes")
   .groupBy(
      window(stock_ticker.timestamp, "10 minutes", "5 minutes"),
      stock_ticker.symbol)
   .max(stock_ticker.price)

Flink Streaming sliding window query

The following is a Flink sliding window query with a window size of 10 minutes and slide interval of 5 minutes:

SELECT symbol, MAX(price)
  FROM TABLE(
    HOP(TABLE stock_ticker, DESCRIPTOR(timestamp), INTERVAL '5' MINUTES, INTERVAL '10' MINUTES))
  GROUP BY ticker;

Handling late data

Both Spark Structured Streaming and Flink support event time processing, where a field within the payload can be used for defining time windows as distinct from the wall clock time of the machines doing the processing. Both Flink and Spark use watermarking for this purpose.

Watermarking is used in stream processing engines to handle delays. A watermark is like a timer that sets how long the system can wait for late events. If an event arrives and is within the set time (watermark), the system will use it to update a request. If it’s later than the watermark, the system will ignore it.

In the preceding windowing queries, you specify the lateness threshold in Spark using the following code:

.withWatermark("timestamp", "3 minutes")

This means that any records that are 3 minutes late as tracked by the event time clock will be discarded.

In contrast, with the Flink Table API, you can specify an analogous lateness threshold directly in the DDL:

WATERMARK FOR timestamp AS timestamp - INTERVAL '3' MINUTE

Note that Flink provides additional constructs for specifying lateness across its various APIs.

Data enrichment

In this section, we compare data enrichment methods with Spark and Flink.

Calling an external API

Calling external APIs from user-defined functions (UDFs) is similar in Spark and Flink. Note that your UDF will be called for every record processed, which can result in the API getting called at a very high request rate. In addition, in production scenarios, your UDF code often gets run in parallel across multiple nodes, further amplifying the request rate.

For the following code snippets, let’s assume that the external API call entails calling the function:

response = my_external_api(request)

External API call in Spark UDF

The following code uses Spark:

class Predict(ScalarFunction):
def open(self, function_context):

with open("resources.zip/resources/model.pkl", "rb") as f:
self.model = pickle.load(f)

def eval(self, x):
return self.model.predict(x)

External API call in Flink UDF

For Flink, assume we define the UDF callExternalAPIUDF, which takes as input the ticker symbol symbol and returns enriched information about the symbol via a REST endpoint. We can then register and call the UDF as follows:

callExternalAPIUDF = udf(callExternalAPIUDF(), result_type=DataTypes.STRING())

SELECT
    symbol, 
    callExternalAPIUDF(symbol) as enriched_symbol
FROM stock_ticker;

Flink UDFs provide an initialization method that gets run one time (as opposed to one time per record processed).

Note that you should use UDFs judiciously as an improperly implemented UDF can cause your job to slow down, cause backpressure, and eventually stall your stream processing application. It’s advisable to use UDFs asynchronously to maintain high throughput, especially for I/O-bound use cases or when dealing with external resources like databases or REST APIs. To learn more about how you can use asynchronous I/O with Apache Flink, refer to Enrich your data stream asynchronously using Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink.

Conclusion

Apache Flink and Apache Spark are both rapidly evolving projects and provide a fast and efficient way to process big data. This post focused on the top use cases we commonly encountered when customers wanted to see parallels between the two technologies for building real-time stream processing applications. We’ve included samples that were most frequently requested at the time of this writing. Let us know if you’d like more examples in the comments section.


About the author

Deepthi Mohan is a Principal Product Manager on the Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics team.

Karthi Thyagarajan was a Principal Solutions Architect on the Amazon Kinesis team.

Simplify external object access in Amazon Redshift using automatic mounting of the AWS Glue Data Catalog

Post Syndicated from Maneesh Sharma original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/simplify-external-object-access-in-amazon-redshift-using-automatic-mounting-of-the-aws-glue-data-catalog/

Amazon Redshift is a petabyte-scale, enterprise-grade cloud data warehouse service delivering the best price-performance. Today, tens of thousands of customers run business-critical workloads on Amazon Redshift to cost-effectively and quickly analyze their data using standard SQL and existing business intelligence (BI) tools.

Amazon Redshift now makes it easier for you to run queries in AWS data lakes by automatically mounting the AWS Glue Data Catalog. You no longer have to create an external schema in Amazon Redshift to use the data lake tables cataloged in the Data Catalog. Now, you can use your AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) credentials or IAM role to browse the Glue Data Catalog and query data lake tables directly from Amazon Redshift Query Editor v2 or your preferred SQL editors.

This feature is now available in all AWS commercial and US Gov Cloud Regions where Amazon Redshift RA3, Amazon Redshift Serverless, and AWS Glue are available. To learn more about auto-mounting of the Data Catalog in Amazon Redshift, refer to Querying the AWS Glue Data Catalog.

Enabling easy analytics for everyone

Amazon Redshift is helping tens of thousands of customers manage analytics at scale. Amazon Redshift offers a powerful analytics solution that provides access to insights for users of all skill levels. You can take advantage of the following benefits:

  • It enables organizations to analyze diverse data sources, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, facilitating comprehensive data exploration
  • With its high-performance processing capabilities, Amazon Redshift handles large and complex datasets, ensuring fast query response times and supporting real-time analytics
  • Amazon Redshift provides features like Multi-AZ (preview) and cross-Region snapshot copy for high availability and disaster recovery, and provides authentication and authorization mechanisms to make it reliable and secure
  • With features like Amazon Redshift ML, it democratizes ML capabilities across a variety of user personas
  • The flexibility to utilize different table formats such as Apache Hudi, Delta Lake, and Apache Iceberg (preview) optimizes query performance and storage efficiency
  • Integration with advanced analytical tools empowers you to apply sophisticated techniques and build predictive models
  • Scalability and elasticity allow for seamless expansion as data and workloads grow

Overall, Amazon Redshift empowers organizations to uncover valuable insights, enhance decision-making, and gain a competitive edge in today’s data-driven landscape.

Amazon Redshift Top Benefits

Amazon Redshift Top Benefits

The new automatic mounting of the AWS Glue Data Catalog feature enables you to directly query AWS Glue objects in Amazon Redshift without the need to create an external schema for each AWS Glue database you want to query. With automatic mounting the Data Catalog, Amazon Redshift automatically mounts the cluster account’s default Data Catalog during boot or user opt-in as an external database, named awsdatacatalog.

Relevant use cases for automatic mounting of the AWS Glue Data Catalog feature

You can use tools like Amazon EMR to create new data lake schemas in various formats, such as Apache Hudi, Delta Lake, and Apache Iceberg (preview). However, when analysts want to run queries against these schemas, it requires administrators to create external schemas for each AWS Glue database in Amazon Redshift. You can now simplify this integration using automatic mounting of the AWS Glue Data Catalog.

The following diagram illustrates this architecture.

Solution overview

You can now use SQL clients like Amazon Redshift Query Editor v2 to browse and query awsdatacatalog. In Query Editor V2, to connect to the awsdatacatalog database, choose the following:

Complete the following high-level steps to integrate the automatic mounting of the Data Catalog using Query Editor V2 and a third-party SQL client:

  1. Provision resources with AWS CloudFormation to populate Data Catalog objects.
  2. Connect Redshift Serverless and query the Data Catalog as a federated user using Query Editor V2.
  3. Connect with Redshift provisioned cluster and query the Data Catalog using Query Editor V2.
  4. Configure permissions on catalog resources using AWS Lake Formation.
  5. Federate with Redshift Serverless and query the Data Catalog using Query Editor V2 and a third-party SQL client.
  6. Discover the auto-mounted objects.
  7. Connect with Redshift provisioned cluster and query the Data Catalog as a federated user using a third-party client.
  8. Connect with Amazon Redshift and query the Data Catalog as an IAM user using third-party clients.

The following diagram illustrates the solution workflow.

Prerequisites

You should have the following prerequisites:

Provision resources with AWS CloudFormation to populate Data Catalog objects

In this post, we use an AWS Glue crawler to create the external table ny_pub stored in Apache Parquet format in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) location s3://redshift-demos/data/NY-Pub/. In this step, we create the solution resources using AWS CloudFormation to create a stack named CrawlS3Source-NYTaxiData in either us-east-1 (use the yml download or launch stack) or us-west-2 (use the yml download or launch stack). Stack creation performs the following actions:

  • Creates the crawler NYTaxiCrawler along with the new IAM role AWSGlueServiceRole-RedshiftAutoMount
  • Creates automountdb as the AWS Glue database

When the stack is complete, perform the following steps:

  1. On the AWS Glue console, under Data Catalog in the navigation pane, choose Crawlers.
  2. Open NYTaxiCrawler and choose Run crawler.

After the crawler is complete, you can see a new table called ny_pub in the Data Catalog under the automountdb database.


Alternatively, you can follow the manual instructions from the Amazon Redshift labs to create the ny_pub table.

Connect with Redshift Serverless and query the Data Catalog as a federated user using Query Editor V2

In this section, we use an IAM role with principal tags to enable fine-grained federated authentication to Redshift Serverless to access auto-mounting AWS Glue objects.

Complete the following steps:

  1. Create an IAM role and add following permissions. For this post, we add full AWS Glue, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon S3 permissions for demo purposes. In an actual production scenario, it’s recommended to apply more granular permissions.

  2. On the Tags tab, create a tag with Key as RedshiftDbRoles and Value as automount.
  3. In Query Editor V2, run the following SQL statement as an admin user to create a database role named automount:
    Create role automount;

  4. Grant usage privileges to the database role:
    GRANT USAGE ON DATABASE awsdatacatalog to role automount;

  5. Switch the role to automountrole by passing the account number and role name.
  6. In the Query Editor v2, choose your Redshift Serverless endpoint (right-click) and choose Create connection.
  7. For Authentication, select Federated user.
  8. For Database, enter the database name you want to connect to.
  9. Choose Create connection.

You’re now ready to explore and query the automatic mounting of the Data Catalog in Redshift Serverless.

Connect with Redshift provisioned cluster and query the Data Catalog using Query Editor V2

To connect with Redshift provisioned cluster and access the Data Catalog, make sure you have completed the steps in the preceding section. Then complete the following steps:

  1. Connect to Redshift Query Editor V2 using the database user name and password authentication method. For example, connect to the dev database using the admin user and password.
  2. In an editor tab, assuming the user is present in Amazon Redshift, run the following SQL statement to grant an IAM user access to the Data Catalog:
    GRANT USAGE ON DATABASE awsdatacatalog to "IAMR:automountrole";

  3. As an admin user, choose the Settings icon, choose Account settings, and select Authenticate with IAM credentials.
  4. Choose Save.
  5. Switch roles to automountrole by passing the account number and role name.
  6. Create or edit the connection and use the authentication method Temporary credentials using your IAM identity.

For more information about this authentication method, see Connecting to an Amazon Redshift database.

You are ready to explore and query the automatic mounting of the Data Catalog in Amazon Redshift.

Discover the auto-mounted objects

This section illustrates the SHOW commands for discovery of auto-mounted objects. See the following code:

// Discovery of Glue databases at the schema level 
SHOW SCHEMAS FROM DATABASE awsdatacatalog;

// Discovery of Glue tables 
 Syntax: SHOW TABLES FROM SCHEMA awsdatacatalog.<glue_db_name>;
Example: SHOW TABLES FROM SCHEMA awsdatacatalog.automountdb;

// Disocvery of Glue table columns 
 Syntax: SHOW COLUMNS FROM TABLE awsdatacatalog.<glue_db_name>.<glue_table_name>;
Example: SHOW COLUMNS FROM TABLE awsdatacatalog.automountdb.ny_pub;

Configure permissions on catalog resources using AWS Lake Formation

To maintain backward compatibility with AWS Glue, Lake Formation has the following initial security settings:

  • The Super permission is granted to the group IAMAllowedPrincipals on all existing Data Catalog resources
  • The Use only IAM access control setting is enabled for new Data Catalog resources

These settings effectively cause access to Data Catalog resources and Amazon S3 locations to be controlled solely by IAM policies. Individual Lake Formation permissions are not in effect.

In this step, we will configure permissions on catalog resources using AWS Lake Formation. Before you create the Data Catalog, you need to update the default settings of Lake Formation so that access to Data Catalog resources (databases and tables) is managed by Lake Formation permissions:

  1. Change the default security settings for new resources. For instructions, see Change the default permission model.
  2. Change the settings for existing Data Catalog resources. For instructions, see Upgrading AWS Glue data permissions to the AWS Lake Formation model.

For more information, refer to Changing the default settings for your data lake.

Federate with Redshift Serverless and query the Data Catalog using Query Editor V2 and a third-party SQL client

With Redshift Serverless, you can connect to awsdatacatalog from a third-party client as a federated user from any identity provider (IdP). In this section, we will configure permission on catalog resources for Federated IAM role in AWS Lake Formation. Using AWS Lake Formation with Redshift, currently permission can be applied on IAM user or IAM role level.

To connect as a federated user, we will be using Redshift Serverless. For setup instructions, refer to Single sign-on with Amazon Redshift Serverless with Okta using Amazon Redshift Query Editor v2 and third-party SQL clients.

There are additional changes required on following resources:

  1. In Amazon Redshift, as an admin user, grant the usage to each federated user who needs access on awsdatacatalog:
    GRANT USAGE ON DATABASE awsdatacatalog to "IAMR:[email protected]";

If the user doesn’t exist in Amazon Redshift, you may need to create the IAM user with the password disabled as shown in the following code and then grant usage on awsdatacatalog:

Create User "IAMR:[email protected]" with password disable;
  1. On the Lake Formation console, assign permissions on the AWS Glue database to the IAM role that you created as part of the federated setup.
    1. Under Principals, select IAM users and roles.
    2. Choose IAM role oktarole.
    3. Apply catalog resource permissions, selecting automountdb database and granting appropriate table permissions.
  2. Update the IAM role used in the federation setup. In addition to the permissions added to the IAM role, you need to add AWS Glue permissions and Amazon S3 permissions to access objects from Amazon S3. For this post, we add full AWS Glue and AWS S3 permissions for demo purposes. In an actual production scenario, it’s recommended to apply more granular permissions.

Now you’re ready to connect to Redshift Serverless using the Query Editor V2 and federated login.

  1. Use the SSO URL from Okta and log in to your Okta account with your user credentials. For this demo, we log in with user Ethan.
  2. In the Query Editor v2, choose your Redshift Serverless instance (right-click) and choose Create connection.
  3. For Authentication, select Federated user.
  4. For Database, enter the database name you want to connect to.
  5. Choose Create connection.
  6. Run the command select current_user to validate that you are logged in as a federated user.

User Ethan will be able to explore and access awsdatacatalog data.

To connect Redshift Serverless with a third-party client, make sure you have followed all the previous steps.

For SQLWorkbench setup, refer to the section Configure the SQL client (SQL Workbench/J) in Single sign-on with Amazon Redshift Serverless with Okta using Amazon Redshift Query Editor v2 and third-party SQL clients.

The following screenshot shows that federated user ethan is able to query the awsdatacatalog tables using three-part notation:

Connect with Redshift provisioned cluster and query the Data Catalog as a federated user using third-party clients

With Redshift provisioned cluster, you can connect with awsdatacatalog from a third-party client as a federated user from any IdP.

To connect as a federated user with the Redshift provisioned cluster, you need to follow the steps in the previous section that detailed how to connect with Redshift Serverless and query the Data Catalog as a federated user using Query Editor V2 and a third-party SQL client.

There are additional changes required in IAM policy. Update the IAM policy with the following code to use the GetClusterCredentialsWithIAM API:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": "iam:ListGroups",
            "Resource": "*"
        },
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor1",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": "redshift:GetClusterCredentialsWithIAM",
            "Resource": "arn:aws:redshift:us-east-2:01234567891:dbname:redshift-cluster-1/dev"
        }
    ]
}

Now you’re ready to connect to Redshift provisioned cluster using a third-party SQL client as a federated user.

For SQLWorkbench setup, refer to the section Configure the SQL client (SQL Workbench/J) in the post Single sign-on with Amazon Redshift Serverless with Okta using Amazon Redshift Query Editor v2 and third-party SQL clients.

Make the following changes:

  • Use the latest Redshift JDBC driver because it only supports querying the auto-mounted Data Catalog table for federated users
  • For URL, enter jdbc:redshift:iam://<cluster endpoint>:<port>:<databasename>?groupfederation=true. For example, jdbc:redshift:iam://redshift-cluster-1.abdef0abc0ab.us-east-2.redshift.amazonaws.com:5439/dev?groupfederation=true.

In the preceding URL, groupfederation is a mandatory parameter that allows you to authenticate with the IAM credentials.

The following screenshot shows that federated user ethan is able to query the awsdatacatalog tables using three-part notation.

Connect and query the Data Catalog as an IAM user using third-party clients

In this section, we provide instructions to set up a SQL client to query the auto-mounted awsdatacatalog.

Use three-part notation to reference the awsdatacatalog table in your SELECT statement. The first part is the database name, the second part is the AWS Glue database name, and the third part is the AWS Glue table name:

SELECT * FROM awsdatacatalog.<aws-glue-db-name>.<aws-glue-table-name>;

You can perform various scenarios that read the Data Catalog data and populate Redshift tables.

For this post, we use SQLWorkbench/J as the SQL client to query the Data Catalog. To set up SQL Workbench/J, complete the following steps:

  1. Create a new connection in SQL Workbench/J and choose Amazon Redshift as the driver.
  2. Choose Manage drivers and add all the files from the downloaded AWS JDBC driver pack .zip file (remember to unzip the .zip file).

You must use the latest Redshift JDBC driver because it only supports querying the auto-mounted Data Catalog table.

  1. For URL, enter jdbc:redshift:iam://<cluster endpoint>:<port>:<databasename>?profile=<profilename>&groupfederation=true. For example, jdbc:redshift:iam://redshift-cluster-1.abdef0abc0ab.us-east-2.redshift.amazonaws.com:5439/dev?profile=user2&groupfederation=true.

We are using profile-based credentials as an example. You can use any AWS profile or IAM credential-based authentication as per your requirement. For more information on IAM credentials, refer to Options for providing IAM credentials.

The following screenshot shows that IAM user johndoe is able to list the awsdatacatalog tables using the SHOW command.

The following screenshot shows that IAM user johndoe is able to query the awsdatacatalog tables using three-part notation:

If you get the following error while using groupfederation=true, you need to use the latest Redshift driver:

Something unusual has occurred to cause the driver to fail. Please report this exception:Authentication with plugin is not supported for group federation [SQL State=99999]

Clean up

Complete the following steps to clean up your resources:

  1. Delete the IAM role automountrole.
  2. Delete the CloudFormation stack CrawlS3Source-NYTaxiData to clean up the crawler NYTaxiCrawler, the automountdb database from the Data Catalog, and the IAM role AWSGlueServiceRole-RedshiftAutoMount.
  3. Update the default settings of Lake Formation:
    1. In the navigation pane, under Data catalog, choose Settings.
    2. Select both access control options choose Save.
    3. In the navigation pane, under Permissions, choose Administrative roles and tasks.
    4. In the Database creators section, choose Grant.
    5. Search for IAMAllowedPrincipals and select Create database permission.
    6. Choose Grant.

Considerations

Note the following considerations:

  • The Data Catalog auto-mount provides ease of use to analysts or database users. The security setup (setting up the permissions model or data governance) is owned by account and database administrators.
    • To achieve fine-grained access control, build a permissions model in AWS Lake Formation.
    • If the permissions have to be maintained at the Redshift database level, leave the AWS Lake Formation default settings as is and then run grant/revoke in Amazon Redshift.
  • If you are using a third-party SQL editor, and your query tool does not support browsing of multiple databases, you can use the “SHOW“ commands to list your AWS Glue databases and tables. You can also query awsdatacatalog objects using three-part notation (SELECT * FROM awsdatacatalog.<aws-glue-db-name>.<aws-glue-table-name>;) provided you have access to the external objects based on the permission model.

Conclusion

In this post, we introduced the automatic mounting of AWS Glue Data Catalog, which makes it easier for customers to run queries in their data lakes. This feature streamlines data governance and access control, eliminating the need to create an external schema in Amazon Redshift to use the data lake tables cataloged in AWS Glue Data Catalog. We showed how you can manage permission on auto-mounted AWS Glue-based objects using Lake Formation. The permission model can be easily managed and organized by administrators, allowing database users to seamlessly access external objects they have been granted access to.

As we strive for enhanced usability in Amazon Redshift, we prioritize unified data governance and fine-grained access control. This feature minimizes manual effort while ensuring the necessary security measures for your organization are in place.

For more information about automatic mounting of the Data Catalog in Amazon Redshift, refer to Querying the AWS Glue Data Catalog.


About the Authors

Maneesh Sharma is a Senior Database Engineer at AWS with more than a decade of experience designing and implementing large-scale data warehouse and analytics solutions. He collaborates with various Amazon Redshift Partners and customers to drive better integration.

Debu-PandaDebu Panda is a Senior Manager, Product Management at AWS. He is an industry leader in analytics, application platform, and database technologies, and has more than 25 years of experience in the IT world.

Rohit Vashishtha is a Senior Analytics Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS based in Dallas, Texas. He has 17 years of experience architecting, building, leading, and maintaining big data platforms. Rohit helps customers modernize their analytic workloads using the breadth of AWS services and ensures that customers get the best price/performance with utmost security and data governance.

Find the best Amazon Redshift configuration for your workload using Redshift Test Drive

Post Syndicated from Sathiish Kumar original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/find-the-best-amazon-redshift-configuration-for-your-workload-using-redshift-test-drive/

Amazon Redshift is a widely used, fully managed, petabyte-scale cloud data warehouse. Tens of thousands of customers use Amazon Redshift to process exabytes of data every day to power their analytics workloads. With the launch of Amazon Redshift Serverless and the various deployment options Amazon Redshift provides (such as instance types and cluster sizes), customers are looking for tools that help them determine the most optimal data warehouse configuration to support their Redshift workload.

In this post, we answer that question by using Redshift Test Drive, an open-source tool that lets you evaluate which different data warehouse configurations options are best suited for your workload. We created Redshift Test Drive from SimpleReplay and redshift-config-compare (see Compare different node types for your workload using Amazon Redshift for more details) to provide a single entry point for finding the best Amazon Redshift configuration for your workload. Redshift Test Drive also provides additional features such as a self-hosted analysis UI and the ability to replicate external objects that a Redshift workload may interact with.

Amazon Redshift RA3 with managed storage is the newest instance type for Provisioned clusters. It allows you to scale and pay for compute and storage independently, as well as use advanced features such as cross-cluster data sharing and cross-Availability Zone cluster relocation. Many customers using previous generation instance types want to upgrade their clusters to RA3 instance types. In this post, we show you how to use Redshift Test Drive to evaluate the performance of an RA3 cluster configuration for your Redshift workloads.

Solution overview

At its core, Redshift Test Drive replicates a workload by extracting queries from the source Redshift data warehouse logs (shown as Workload Extractor in the following figure) and replays the extracted workload against the target Redshift data warehouses (Workload Replayer).

If these workloads interact with external objects via Amazon Redshift Spectrum (such as the AWS Glue Data Catalog) or COPY commands, Redshift Test Drive offers an external object replicator utility to clone these objects to facilitate replay.

Workload replicator architecture

Redshift Test Drive uses this process of workload replication for two main functionalities: comparing configurations and comparing replays.

Compare Amazon Redshift configurations

Redshift Test Drive’s ConfigCompare utility (based on redshift-config-compare tool) helps you find the best Redshift data warehouse configuration by using your workload to run performance and functional tests on different configurations in parallel. This utility’s automation starts by creating a new AWS CloudFormation stack based on this CloudFormation template. The CloudFormation stack creates an AWS Step Function state machine, which internally uses AWS Lambda functions to trigger AWS Batch jobs to run workload comparison across different Redshift instance types. These jobs extract the workload from the source Redshift data warehouse log location across the specified workload time (as provided in the config parameters) and then replays the extracted workload against a list of different target Redshift data warehouse configurations as provided in the configuration file. When the replay is complete, the Step Functions state machine uploads the performance stats for the target configurations to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket and creates external schemas that can then be queried from any Redshift target to identify a target configuration that meets your performance requirements.

The following diagram illustrates the architecture of this utility.

Architecture of ConfigCompare utility

Compare replay performance

Redshift Test Drive also provides the ability to compare the replay runs visually using a self-hosted UI tool. This tool reads the stats generated by the workload replicator (stored in Amazon S3) and helps compare the replay runs across key performance indicators such as longest running queries, error distribution, queries with most deviation of latency across runs, and more.

The following diagram illustrates the architecture for the UI.

Replay Performance analysis UI architecture

Walkthrough overview

In this post, we provide a step-by-step walkthrough of using Redshift Test Drive to automatically replay your workload against different Amazon Redshift configurations with the ConfigCompare utility. Subsequently, we use the self-hosted analysis UI utility to analyze the output of ConfigCompare for determining the optimal target warehouse configuration to migrate or upgrade. The following diagram illustrates the workflow.

Walkthrough Steps

Prerequisites

The following prerequisites should be addressed before we run the ConfigCompare utility:

  • Enable audit logging and user-activity logging in your source cluster.
  • Take a snapshot of the source Redshift data warehouse.
  • Export your source parameter group and WLM configurations to Amazon S3. The parameter group can be exported using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), for example, using CloudShell, by running the following code:
    aws redshift describe-cluster-parameters —parameter-group-name <YOUR-SOURCE-CLUSTER-PARAMETER-GROUP-NAME> —output json >> param_group_src.json
    
    aws s3 cp param_group_src.json s3://<YOUR-BUCKET-NAME>/param_group_src.json

  • The WLM configurations can be copied as JSON in the console, from where you can enter them into a file and upload it to Amazon S3. If you want to test any alternative WLM configurations (such as comparing manual vs. auto WLM or enabling concurrency scaling), you can create a separate file with that target configuration and upload it to Amazon S3 as well.
  • Identify the target configurations you want to test. If you’re upgrading from DC2 to RA3 node types, refer to Upgrading to RA3 node types for recommendations.

For this walkthrough, let’s assume you have an existing Redshift data warehouse configuration with a two-node dc2.8xlarge provisioned cluster. You want to validate whether upgrading your current configuration to a decoupled architecture using the RA3 provisioned node type or Redshift Serverless would meet your workload price/performance requirements.

The following table summarizes the Redshift data warehouse configurations that are evaluated as part of this test.

Warehouse Type Number of Nodes/Base RPU Option
dc2.8xlarge 2 default auto WLM
ra3.4xlarge 4 default auto WLM
Redshift Serverless 64 auto scaling
Redshift Serverless 128 auto scaling

Run the ConfigCompare utility

Before you run the utility, customize the details of the workload to replay, including the time period and the target warehouse configurations to test, in a JSON file. Upload this file to Amazon S3 and copy the S3 URI path to use as an input parameter for the CloudFormation template that deploys the resources for the remaining orchestration.

You can read more about the individual components and inputs of JSON file in the Readme.

For our use case, we use the following JSON file as an input to the utility:

{
   "SNAPSHOT_ID": "redshift-cluster-manual-snapshot",
   "SNAPSHOT_ACCOUNT_ID": "123456789012",

   "PARAMETER_GROUP_CONFIG_S3_PATH": "s3://nodeconfig-artifacts/pg_config.json",

   "DDL_AND_COPY_SCRIPT_S3_PATH": "N/A",
   "SQL_SCRIPT_S3_PATH":"N/A",
   "NUMBER_OF_PARALLEL_SESSIONS_LIST": "N/A",
   "SIMPLE_REPLAY_LOG_LOCATION":"s3://redshift-logging-xxxxxxxx/RSLogs/",
   "SIMPLE_REPLAY_EXTRACT_START_TIME":"2023-01-28T15:45:00+00:00",
   "SIMPLE_REPLAY_EXTRACT_END_TIME":"2023-01-28T16:15:00+00:00",

   "SIMPLE_REPLAY_EXTRACT_OVERWRITE_S3_PATH":"N/A",
   "SIMPLE_REPLAY_OVERWRITE_S3_PATH":"N/A",

   "SIMPLE_REPLAY_UNLOAD_STATEMENTS": "true",

   "AUTO_PAUSE": true,
   "DATABASE_NAME": "database_name",

   "CONFIGURATIONS": [
    	{
      	"TYPE": "Provisioned",
      	"NODE_TYPE": "dc2.8xlarge",
      	"NUMBER_OF_NODES": "6",
      	"WLM_CONFIG_S3_PATH": "s3://nodeconfig-artifacts/wlm.json"
     },
     {
      	"TYPE": "Provisioned",
      	"NODE_TYPE": "ra3.4xlarge",
      	"NUMBER_OF_NODES": "12",
      	"WLM_CONFIG_S3_PATH": "s3://nodeconfig-artifacts/wlm.json"
     },
     {
      	"TYPE": "Serverless",
      	"BASE_RPU": "128"
     },
     {
      	"TYPE": "Serverless",
      	"BASE_RPU": "64"
     }
   ]
}

The utility deploys all the data warehouse configurations included in the CONFIGURATIONS section of the JSON file. A replica of the source configuration is also included to be used for a baseline of the existing workload performance.

After this file is fully configured and uploaded to Amazon S3, navigate to the AWS CloudFormation console and create a new stack based on the this CloudFormation template and specify the relevant parameters. For more details on the individual parameters, refer to the GitHub repo. The following screenshot shows the parameters used for this walkthrough.

Configuration parameters for Cloudformation Template

After this is updated, proceed with the subsequent steps on the AWS CloudFormation console to launch a new stack.

When the stack is fully created, select the stack and open the Resources tab. Here, you can search for the term StepFunctions and choose the hyperlink next to the RedshiftConfigTestingStepFunction physical ID to open the Step Functions state machine to run the utility.

Searching for ConfigTestingStepFunction

On the Step Functions page that opens, choose Start execution. Leave the default values and choose Start execution to trigger the run. Monitor the progress of the state machine’s run on the graph view of the page. The full run will take approximately the same time as the time window that was specified in the JSON configuration file.

StepFunction Execution example

When the status of the run changes from Running to Succeeded, the run is complete.

Analyze the results

When the Step Functions state machine run is complete, the performance metrics are uploaded to the S3 bucket created by the CloudFormation template initially. To analyze the performance of the workload across different configurations, you can use the self-hosted UI tool that comes with Redshift Test Drive. Set up this tool for your workload by following the instructions provided in this Readme.

After you point the UI to the S3 location that has the stats from the ConfigCompare run, the Replays section will populate with the analysis for replays found in the input S3 location. Select the target configurations you want to compare and choose Analysis to navigate to the comparisons page.

AnalysisUI example list of replays

You can use the Filter Results section to denote which query types, users, and time frame to compare, and the Analysis section will expand to a section providing analysis of all the selected replays. Here you can see a comparison of the SELECT queries run by the ad hoc user of the replay.

AnalysisUI filter results

The following screenshot shows an example of the analysis of a replay. These results show the distribution of queries completed over the full run for a given user and query type, allowing us to identify periods of high and low activity. We can also see runtimes of these queries, aggregated as percentiles, average, and standard deviation. For example, the P50 value indicates that 50% of queries ran within 26.564 seconds. The parameters used to filter for specific users, query types, and runtimes can be dynamically updated to allow the results and comparisons to be comprehensively investigated according to the specific performance requirements each individual use case demands.

AnalysisUI compare throughput example

Troubleshooting

As shown in the solution architecture, the main moving parts in the ConfigCompare automation are AWS CloudFormation, Step Functions (internally using Lambda), and AWS Batch.

If any resource in the CloudFormation stack fails to deploy, we recommend troubleshooting the issue based on the error shown on the AWS CloudFormation console.

To troubleshoot errors with the Step Functions state machine, locate the Amazon CloudWatch logs for a step by navigating to the state machine’s latest run on the Step Functions console and choosing CloudWatch Logs for the failed Step Functions step. After resolving the error, you can restart the state machine by choosing New execution.

Troubleshooting Step Function

For AWS Batch errors, locate the AWS Batch logs by navigating to the AWS CloudFormation console and choosing the Resources tab in the CloudFormation stack. On this tab, search for LogGroup to find the AWS Batch run logs.

Troubleshooting Cloudwatch logs

For more information about common errors and their solutions, refer to the Test Drive Readme.

Clean up

When you have completed the evaluation, we recommend manually deleting the deployed Redshift warehouses to avoid any on-demand charges that could accrue. After this, you can delete the CloudFormation stack to clean up other resources.

Limitations

Some of the limitations for the WorkloadReplicator (the core utility supporting the ConfigCompare tool) are outlined in the Readme.

Conclusion

In this post, we demonstrated the process of finding the right Redshift data warehouse configuration using Redshift Test Drive. The utility offers an easy-to-use tool to replicate the workload of your choice against customizable data warehouse configurations. It also provides a self-hosted analysis UI to help you dive deeper into the stats generated during the replication process.

Get started with Test Drive today by following the instructions provided in the Readme. For an in-depth overview of the config compare automation, refer to Compare different node types for your workload using Amazon Redshift. If you’re migrating from DC2 or DS2 node types to RA3, refer to our recommendations on node count and type as a benchmark.


About the Authors

Sathiish Kumar is a Software Development Manager at Amazon Redshift and has worked on building end-to-end applications using different database and technology solutions over the last 10 years. He is passionate about helping his customers find the quickest and the most optimized solution to their problems by leveraging open-source technologies.

Julia Beck is an Analytics Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. She supports customers in validating analytics solutions by architecting proof of concept workloads designed to meet their specific needs.

Ranjan Burman is an Analytics Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. He specializes in Amazon Redshift and helps customers build scalable analytical solutions. He has more than 16 years of experience in different database and data warehousing technologies. He is passionate about automating and solving customer problems with cloud solutions.