Tag Archives: announcements

Amazon SageMaker JumpStart Simplifies Access to Pre-built Models and Machine Learning Solutions

Post Syndicated from Julien Simon original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-sagemaker-jumpstart-simplifies-access-to-prebuilt-models-and-machine-learning-models/

Today, I’m extremely happy to announce the availability of Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, a capability of Amazon SageMaker that accelerates your machine learning workflows with one-click access to popular model collections (also known as “model zoos”), and to end-to-end solutions that solve common use cases.

In recent years, machine learning (ML) has proven to be a valuable technique in improving and automating business processes. Indeed, models trained on historical data can accurately predict outcomes across a wide range of industry segments: financial services, retail, manufacturing, telecom, life sciences, and so on. Yet, working with these models requires skills and experience that only a subset of scientists and developers have: preparing a dataset, selecting an algorithm, training a model, optimizing its accuracy, deploying it in production, and monitoring its performance over time.

In order to simplify the model building process, the ML community has created model zoos, that is to say, collections of models built with popular open source libraries, and often pretrained on reference datasets. For example, the TensorFlow Hub and the PyTorch Hub provide developers with a long list of models ready to be downloaded, and integrated in applications for computer vision, natural language processing, and more.

Still, downloading a model is just part of the answer. Developers then need to deploy it for evaluation and testing, using either a variety of tools, such as the TensorFlow Serving and TorchServe model servers, or their own bespoke code. Once the model is running, developers need to figure out the correct format that incoming data should have, a long-lasting pain point. I’m sure I’m not the only one regularly pulling my hair out here!

Of course, a full-ML application usually has a lot of moving parts. Data needs to be preprocessed, enriched with additional data fetched from a backend, and funneled into the model. Predictions are often postprocessed, and stored for further analysis and visualization. As useful as they are, model zoos only help with the modeling part. Developers still have lots of extra work to deliver a complete ML solution.

Because of all this, ML experts are flooded with a long backlog of projects waiting to start. Meanwhile, less experienced practitioners struggle to get started. These barriers are incredibly frustrating, and our customers asked us to remove them.

Introducing Amazon SageMaker JumpStart
Amazon SageMaker JumpStart is integrated in Amazon SageMaker Studio, our fully integrated development environment (IDE) for ML, making it intuitive to discover models, solutions, and more. At launch, SageMaker JumpStart includes:

  • 15+ end-to-end solutions for common ML use cases such as fraud detection, predictive maintenance, and so on.
  • 150+ models from the TensorFlow Hub and the PyTorch Hub, for computer vision (image classification, object detection), and natural language processing (sentence classification, question answering).
  • Sample notebooks for the built-in algorithms available in Amazon SageMaker.

SageMaker JumpStart also provides notebooks, blogs, and video tutorials designed to help you learn and remove roadblocks. Content is easily accessible within Amazon SageMaker Studio, enabling you to get started with ML faster.

It only takes a single click to deploy solutions and models. All infrastructure is fully managed, so all you have to do is enjoy a nice cup of tea or coffee while deployment takes place. After a few minutes, you can start testing, thanks to notebooks and sample prediction code that are readily available in Amazon SageMaker Studio. Of course, you can easily modify them to use your own data.

SageMaker JumpStart makes it extremely easy for experienced practitioners and beginners alike to quickly deploy and evaluate models and solutions, saving days or even weeks of work. By drastically shortening the path from experimentation to production, SageMaker JumpStart accelerates ML-powered innovation, particularly for organizations and teams that are early on their ML journey, and haven’t yet accumulated a lot of skills and experience.

Now, let me show you how SageMaker JumpStart works.

Deploying a Solution with Amazon SageMaker JumpStart
Opening SageMaker Studio, I select the “JumpStart” icon on the left. This opens a new tab showing me all available content (solutions, models, and so on).

Let’s say that I’m interested in using computer vision to detect defects in manufactured products. Could ML be the answer?

Browsing the list of available solutions, I see one for product defect detection.

Opening it, I can learn more about the type of problems that it solves, the sample dataset used in the demo, the AWS services involved, and more.

SageMaker screenshot

A single click is all it takes to deploy this solution. Under the hood, AWS CloudFormation uses a built-in template to provision all appropriate AWS resources.

A few minutes later, the solution is deployed, and I can open its notebook.

SageMaker screenshot

The notebook opens immediately in SageMaker Studio. I run the demo, and understand how ML can help me detect product defects. This is also a nice starting point for my own project, making it easy to experiment with my own dataset (feel free to click on the image below to zoom in).

SageMaker screenshot

Once I’m done with this solution, I can delete all its resources in one click, letting AWS CloudFormation clean up without having to worry about leaving idle AWS resources behind.

SageMaker screenshot

Now, let’s look at models.

Deploying a Model with Amazon SageMaker JumpStart
SageMaker JumpStart includes a large collection of models available in the TensorFlow Hub and the PyTorch Hub. These models are pre-trained on reference datasets, and you can use them directly to handle a wide range of computer vision and natural language processing tasks. You can also fine-tune them on your own datasets for greater accuracy, a technique called transfer learning.

SageMaker screenshot
Here, I pick a version of the BERT model trained on question answering. I can either deploy it as is, or fine-tune it. For the sake of brevity, I go with the former here, and I just click on the “Deploy” button.

SageMaker screenshot

A few minutes later, the model has been deployed to a real-time endpoint powered by fully managed infrastructure.

SageMaker screenshot

Time to test it! Clicking on “Open Notebook” launches a sample notebook that I run right away to test the model, without having to change a line of code (again, feel free to click on the image below to zoom in). Here, I’m asking two questions (“What is Southern California often abbreviated as?” and “Who directed Spectre?“), passing some context containing the answer. In both cases, the BERT model gives the correct answer, respectively “socal” and “Sam Mendes“.

SageMaker screenshot

When I’m done testing, I can delete the endpoint in one click, and stop paying for it.

Getting Started
As you can see, it’s extremely easy to deploy models and solutions with SageMaker JumpStart in minutes, even if you have little or no ML skills.

You can start using this capability today in all regions where SageMaker Studio is available, at no additional cost.

Give it a try and let us know what you think.

As always, we’re looking forward to your feedback, either through your usual AWS support contacts, or on the AWS Forum for SageMaker.

– Julien

Special thanks to my colleague Jared Heywood for his precious help during early testing.

New – Amazon SageMaker Pipelines Brings DevOps Capabilities to your Machine Learning Projects

Post Syndicated from Julien Simon original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-sagemaker-pipelines-brings-devops-to-machine-learning-projects/

Today, I’m extremely happy to announce Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, a new capability of Amazon SageMaker that makes it easy for data scientists and engineers to build, automate, and scale end to end machine learning pipelines.

Machine learning (ML) is intrinsically experimental and unpredictable in nature. You spend days or weeks exploring and processing data in many different ways, trying to crack the geode open to reveal its precious gemstones. Then, you experiment with different algorithms and parameters, training and optimizing lots of models in search of highest accuracy. This process typically involves lots of different steps with dependencies between them, and managing it manually can become quite complex. In particular, tracking model lineage can be difficult, hampering auditability and governance. Finally, you deploy your top models, and you evaluate them against your reference test sets. Finally? Not quite, as you’ll certainly iterate again and again, either to try out new ideas, or simply to periodically retrain your models on new data.

No matter how exciting ML is, it does unfortunately involve a lot of repetitive work. Even small projects will require hundreds of steps before they get the green light for production. Over time, not only does this work detract from the fun and excitement of your projects, it also creates ample room for oversight and human error.

To alleviate manual work and improve traceability, many ML teams have adopted the DevOps philosophy and implemented tools and processes for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). Although this is certainly a step in the right direction, writing your own tools often leads to complex projects that require more software engineering and infrastructure work than you initially anticipated. Valuable time and resources are diverted from the actual ML project, and innovation slows down. Sadly, some teams decide to revert to manual work, for model management, approval, and deployment.

Introducing Amazon SageMaker Pipelines
Simply put, Amazon SageMaker Pipelines brings in best-in-class DevOps practices to your ML projects. This new capability makes it easy for data scientists and ML developers to create automated and reliable end-to-end ML pipelines. As usual with SageMaker, all infrastructure is fully managed, and doesn’t require any work on your side.

Care.com is the world’s leading platform for finding and managing high-quality family care. Here’s what Clemens Tummeltshammer, Data Science Manager, Care.com, told us: “A strong care industry where supply matches demand is essential for economic growth from the individual family up to the nation’s GDP. We’re excited about Amazon SageMaker Feature Store and Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, as we believe they will help us scale better across our data science and development teams, by using a consistent set of curated data that we can use to build scalable end-to-end machine learning (ML) model pipelines from data preparation to deployment. With the newly announced capabilities of Amazon SageMaker, we can accelerate development and deployment of our ML models for different applications, helping our customers make better informed decisions through faster real-time recommendations.”

Let me tell you more about the main components in Amazon SageMaker Pipelines: pipelines, model registry, and MLOps templates.

Pipelines – Model building pipelines are defined with a simple Python SDK. They can include any operation available in Amazon SageMaker, such as data preparation with Amazon SageMaker Processing or Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, model training, model deployment to a real-time endpoint, or batch transform. You can also add Amazon SageMaker Clarify to your pipelines, in order to detect bias prior to training, or once the model has been deployed. Likewise, you can add Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor to detect data and prediction quality issues.

Once launched, model building pipelines are executed as CI/CD pipelines. Every step is recorded, and detailed logging information is available for traceability and debugging purposes. Of course, you can also visualize pipelines in Amazon SageMaker Studio, and track their different executions in real time.

Model Registry – The model registry lets you track and catalog your models. In SageMaker Studio, you can easily view model history, list and compare versions, and track metadata such as model evaluation metrics. You can also define which versions may or may not be deployed in production. In fact, you can even build pipelines that automatically trigger model deployment once approval has been given. You’ll find that the model registry is very useful in tracing model lineage, improving model governance, and strengthening your compliance posture.

MLOps Templates – SageMaker Pipelines includes a collection of built-in CI/CD templates for popular pipelines (build/train/deploy, deploy only, and so on). You can also add and publish your own templates, so that your teams can easily discover them and deploy them. Not only do templates save lots of time, they also make it easy for ML teams to collaborate from experimentation to deployment, using standard processes and without having to manage any infrastructure. Templates also let Ops teams customize steps as needed, and give them full visibility for troubleshooting.

Now, let’s do a quick demo!

Building an End-to-end Pipeline with Amazon SageMaker Pipelines
Opening SageMaker Studio, I select the “Components” tab and the “Projects” view. This displays a list of built-in project templates. I pick one to build, train, and deploy a model.

SageMaker screenshot

Then, I simply give my project a name, and create it.

A few seconds later, the project is ready. I can see that it includes two Git repositories hosted in AWS CodeCommit, one for model training, and one for model deployment.

SageMaker screenshot

The first repository provides scaffolding code to create a multi-step model building pipeline: data processing, model training, model evaluation, and conditional model registration based on accuracy. As you’ll see in the pipeline.py file, this pipeline trains a linear regression model using the XGBoost algorithm on the well-known Abalone dataset. This repository also includes a build specification file, used by AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild to execute the pipeline automatically.

Likewise, the second repository contains code and configuration files for model deployment, as well as test scripts required to pass the quality gate. This operation is also based on AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild, which run a AWS CloudFormation template to create model endpoints for staging and production.

Clicking on the two blue links, I clone the repositories locally. This triggers the first execution of the pipeline.

SageMaker screenshot

A few minutes later, the pipeline has run successfully. Switching to the “Pipelines” view, I can visualize its steps.

SageMaker screenshot

Clicking on the training step, I can see the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) metrics for my model.

SageMaker screenshot

As the RMSE is lower than the threshold defined in the conditional step, my model is added to the model registry, as visible below.

SageMaker screenshot

For simplicity, the registration step sets the model status to “Approved”, which automatically triggers its deployment to a real-time endpoint in the same account. Within seconds, I see that the model is being deployed.

SageMaker screenshot

Alternatively, you could register your model with a “Pending manual approval” status. This will block deployment until the model has been reviewed and approved manually. As the model registry supports cross-account deployment, you could also easily deploy in a different account, without having to copy anything across accounts.

A few minutes later, the endpoint is up, and I could use it to test my model.

SageMaker screenshot

Once I’ve made sure that this model works as expected, I could ping the MLOps team, and ask them to deploy the model in production.

Putting my MLOps hat on, I open the AWS CodePipeline console, and I see that my deployment is indeed waiting for approval.

SageMaker screenshot

I then approve the model for deployment, which triggers the final stage of the pipeline.

SageMaker screenshot

Reverting to my Data Scientist hat, I see in SageMaker Studio that my model is being deployed. Job done!

SageMaker screenshot

Getting Started
As you can see, Amazon SageMaker Pipelines makes it really easy for Data Science and MLOps teams to collaborate using familiar tools. They can create and execute robust, automated ML pipelines that deliver high quality models in production quicker than before.

You can start using SageMaker Pipelines in all commercial regions where SageMaker is available. The MLOps capabilities are available in the regions where CodePipeline is also available.

Sample notebooks are available to get you started. Give them a try, and let us know what you think. We’re always looking forward to your feedback, either through your usual AWS support contacts, or on the AWS Forum for SageMaker.

– Julien

Special thanks to my colleague Urvashi Chowdhary for her precious assistance during early testing.

Introducing Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, a Visual Interface to Prepare Data for Machine Learning

Post Syndicated from Julien Simon original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-amazon-sagemaker-data-wrangler-a-visual-interface-to-prepare-data-for-machine-learning/

Today, I’m extremely happy to announce Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, a new capability of Amazon SageMaker that makes it faster for data scientists and engineers to prepare data for machine learning (ML) applications by using a visual interface.

Whenever I ask a group of data scientists and ML engineers how much time they actually spend studying ML problems, I often hear a collective sigh, followed by something along the lines of, “20%, if we’re lucky.” When I ask them why, the answer is invariably the same, “data preparation consistently takes up to 80% of our time!”

Indeed, preparing data for training is a crucial step of the ML process, and no one would think about botching it up. Typical tasks include:

  • Locating data: finding where raw data is stored, and getting access to it
  • Data visualization: examining statistical properties for each column in the dataset, building histograms, studying outliers
  • Data cleaning: removing duplicates, dropping or filling entries with missing values, removing outliers
  • Data enrichment and feature engineering: processing columns to build more expressive features, selecting a subset of features for training

In the early stage of a new ML project, this is a highly manual process, where intuition and experience play a large part. Using a mix of bespoke tools and open source tools such as pandas or PySpark, data scientists often experiment with different combinations of data transformations, and use them to process datasets before training models. Then, they analyze prediction results and iterate. As important as this is, looping through this process again and again can be time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone.

At some point, you will hit the right level of accuracy (or whatever other metric you’ve picked), and you’ll then want to train on the full dataset in your production environment. However, you’ll first have to reproduce and automate the exact data preparation steps that you experimented within your sandbox. Unfortunately, there’s always room for error given the interactive nature of this work, even if you carefully document it.

Last but not least, you’ll have to manage and scale your data processing infrastructure before you get to the finish line. Now that I think of it, 80% of your time may not be enough to do all of this!

Introducing Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler
Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler is integrated in Amazon SageMaker Studio, our fully managed integrated development environment (IDE) for ML. With just a few clicks, you can connect to data sources, explore and visualize data, apply built-in transformations as well as your own, export the resulting code to an auto-generated script, and run it on managed infrastructure. Let’s look at each step in more detail.

Obviously, data preparation starts with locating and accessing data. Out of the box, SageMaker Data Wrangler lets you easily and quickly connect to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift and AWS Lake Formation. You can also import data from Amazon SageMaker Feature Store. As all things AWS, access management is governed by AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), based on the permissions attached to your SageMaker Studio instance.

Once you’ve connected to your data sources, you’ll probably want to visualize your data. Using the SageMaker Data Wrangler user interface, you can view table summaries, histograms, and scatter plots in seconds. You can also build your own custom graphs by simply copying and running code written with the popular Altair open source library.

Once you’ve got a good grasp on what your data looks like, it’s time to start preparing it. SageMaker Data Wrangler includes 300+ built-in transformations, such as finding and replacing data, splitting/renaming/dropping columns, scaling numerical values, encoding categorical values, and so on. All you have to do is select the transformation in a drop-down list, and fill in the parameters it may require. You can then preview the change, and decide whether you’d like to add it or not to the list of preparation steps for this dataset. If you’d like, you can also add your own code to implement custom transformations, using either pandas, PySpark, or PySpark SQL.

As you add transformation steps to your processing pipeline, you can view its graphical summary in SageMaker Studio. You can also add new stages to the pipeline, for example a new data source, or another group of transformation steps (say, a data cleaning group, followed by a feature engineering group). Thanks to the intuitive user interface, your data preparation pipeline will take shape in front of your eyes, and you’ll instantly be able to check that processed data looks the way that it should.

Early on, you’d certainly love to check your data preparation steps, and also get a sense of their predictive power, wouldn’t you? Good news, then! For regression and classification problem types, the “Quick model” capability lets you select a subset of your data, train a model, and determine which features are contributing most to the predicted outcome. Looking at the model, you can easily diagnose and fix data preparation issues as early as possible, and to determine if additional feature engineering is needed to improve your model performance.

Once you’re happy with your pipeline, you can export it in one click to a Python script that faithfully reproduces your manual steps. You won’t waste any time chasing discrepancies, and you can directly add this code to your ML project.

In addition, you can also export your processing code to:

Now, let’s do a quick demo, and show you how easy it is to work with SageMaker Data Wrangler .

Using Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler
Opening SageMaker Studio, I create a new data flow in order to process the Titanic dataset, which contains information on passengers, and labels showing whether they survived the wreck or not.

SageMaker screenshot

My dataset is stored as a CSV file in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and I select the appropriate data source.

SageMaker screenshot

Using the built-in tool, I quickly navigate my S3 buckets, and I locate the CSV file containing my data. For larger datasets, SageMaker Data Wrangler also supports the Parquet format.

As I select my file, SageMaker Data Wrangler shows me the first few rows.

SageMaker screenshot

I import the dataset, and I’m presented with an initial view of the data flow. Right-clicking on the dataset, I select “Edit data types” to make sure that SageMaker Data Wrangler has correctly detected the type of each column in the dataset.

SageMaker screenshot

Checking each column, it looks like all types are correct.

SageMaker screenshot

Moving back to the data flow view, I select “Add analysis” this time. This opens a new view where I can visualize data using histograms, scatterplots, and more. For example, I build an histogram showing me the age distribution of passengers according to their survival status, and coloring the bins using their gender. Of course, I can save it for future use.

SageMaker screenshot

Moving back to the data flow view once again, I select “Add transform” in order to start processing the dataset. This opens a new view, showing me the first lines of the dataset, as well as a list of 300+ built-in transforms.

SageMaker screenshot

Pclass, the passenger class, is a categorical variable, and I decide to encode it using one-hot encoding. This creates 3 new columns representing different dimensions, and I can preview them. As this is exactly what I wanted, I apply this transform for good. Likewise, I apply the same transform to the Sex column.

SageMaker screenshot

Then, I drop the original Pclass column. Using the same transform, I also drop the Name column.

SageMaker screenshot

In order to get a quick idea on whether these transformations increase or decrease the accuracy of the model, I can create a analysis that trains a model on the spot. As my problem is a binary classification problem, SageMaker Data Wrangler uses a metric called the F1 score. 0.749 is a good start, and additional processing would certainly improve it. I can also see which features contribute most to the predicted outcome: sex, age, and being a third class passenger.

SageMaker screenshot

Then, moving to the “Export” view, I select all the transforms I’ve created so far, in order to add them to my ML project.

SageMaker screenshot

Here, I select “Python Code” to generate a Python script. Other options are available for Amazon SageMaker Processing, Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, and Amazon SageMaker Feature Store.

SageMaker screenshot

A few seconds later, the script is available. I could add it as is to my ML project, and rest assured that my data preparation steps would be consistent with the interactive transforms that I’ve created above.

SageMaker screenshot

Getting Started
As you can see, Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler makes it really easy to work interactively on data preparation steps, before transforming them into code that can be used immediately for experimentation and production.

You can start using this capability today in all regions where SageMaker Studio is available.

Give it a try, and let us know what you think. We’re always looking forward to your feedback, either through your usual AWS support contacts, or on the AWS Forum for SageMaker.

– Julien

Special thanks to my colleague Peter Liu for his precious help during early testing.

Preview: Amazon Lookout for Metrics, an Anomaly Detection Service for Monitoring the Health of Your Business

Post Syndicated from Alex Casalboni original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/preview-amazon-lookout-for-metrics-anomaly-detection-service-monitoring-health-business/

We are excited to announce Amazon Lookout for Metrics, a new service that uses machine learning (ML) to detect anomalies in your metrics, helping you proactively monitor the health of your business, diagnose issues, and find opportunities quickly – with no ML experience required.

Lookout for Metrics uses the same technology used by Amazon to detect anomalous changes in data that are otherwise hard to find, while reducing the number of false detections. It also groups similar findings together, ranks them by severity, and provides information to determine the root cause of the anomalies.

It can be used across a wide variety of metrics such as revenue, web page views, daily active users, churn rate, transaction volume, mobile app installations, and more. Lookout for Metrics is now available in preview today.

Why Use Amazon Lookout for Metrics for Anomaly Detection?
Organizations across all industries are looking to improve efficiency in their business through technology and automation. While challenges may vary, what’s common is that being able to identify defects and opportunities early and often can lead to material cost savings, higher margins, and better customer experience. Traditionally, organizations rely on manual audits of large amounts of data, which is not scalable and is prone to human error. Others use rule-based methods based on arbitrary ranges, which are often static, do not easily adapt to seasonality changes, and lead to too many false detections.

When anomalies are detected, developers, analysts, and business owners can spend weeks trying to identify the root cause of the change. These are situations where ML can be an effective and transformational tool. However, ML algorithms need to be carefully selected, trained, tested, and deployed for each type of data – requiring a skilled team of ML experts.

Amazon has a long history of being a data-driven company, with a growing number of businesses that need to stay on top of the health of their business, operations, and customer experience. A key part of this effort over the years has involved building and improving ML technology to detect anomalies in key performance indicators (KPI) such as website visits from different traffic channels, number of products added to the shopping cart, number of orders placed, revenue for every product category, and more.

Amazon Lookout for Metrics puts the same ML technology used by Amazon in the hands of every developer. It finds anomalies in your data, groups them intelligently, helps you visualize aggregated results, and automates alerts.

Because it’s a fully managed service, it takes care of the whole ML process so you can get started quickly and focus on your core business. And most importantly, the service improves model performance continually by incorporating your real-time feedback on the accuracy and relevance of the anomalies and root cause analysis.

How Amazon Lookout for Metrics Works
You can get started with Lookout for Metrics with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. Without having to write any code, you connect your data to the service through the built-in data source integrations; next Lookout for Metrics trains a custom model for your data; and finally, it begins detecting anomalies for you to review and start taking action on.

Lookout for Metrics continuously monitors data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Redshift, Amazon CloudWatch, or SaaS integrations supported by Amazon AppFlow such as Salesforce, Marketo, Google Analytics, Slack, Zendesk, and many more.

During this phase, you can flag each field in your dataset as a measure (or KPI), dimension, or timestamp. For example, if you want to monitor abnormal changes in page views for every device type separately, then you would select page_views as the measure and device_type as the dimension.

Once your data source is configured and connected, Lookout for Metrics inspects and prepares the data for analysis and selects the right algorithm to build the most accurate anomaly detection model. This detector runs on your data at a configurable cadence (every few minutes, hourly, daily, and so on) and provides a threshold dial that allows you to adjust its sensitivity.

When detecting an anomaly, Lookout for Metrics helps you focus on what matters the most by assigning a severity score to aid prioritization. To help you find the root cause, it intelligently groups anomalies that may be related to the same incident and summarizes the different sources of impact (as shown below).

Moreover, you can configure an automatic action such as sending a notification via Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Datadog, PagerDuty, Webhooks, or Slack. Or you can trigger a Lambda function, for example to temporarily hide a product on your e-commerce site when a potential pricing error is detected.

Domain knowledge and expertise can often play an important role in determining if a sudden change in a metric is expected or is an anomaly. Lookout for Metrics allows you to provide real-time feedback on the relevance of the detected anomalies, enabling a powerful human-in-the-loop mechanism. This information is fed back to the anomaly detection model to improve its accuracy.

Who’s Using Amazon Lookout for Metrics Today?
Digitata Networks offers intelligent customer, network and site-centric solutions that assist Mobile Network Operators to monitor, audit, control and automate different aspects of their network. Company CTO Nico Kruger has been pleased with the results he’s seen so far from using Lookout for Metrics.

“We discovered the improved accuracy and insights that Lookout for Metrics can bring to our existing solution and we are thrilled to use the service…we can quickly identify opportunities in addition to finding issues,” he said.

Playrix, one of the leading mobile game developers in the world, known for high-quality games such as Township, Fishdom, and Gardenscapes, is another customer that’s been working with the new service. “We experimented with our user acquisition data to understand how the service works and it quickly identified and grouped anomalies enabling us to work faster and better,” said Mikhail Artyugin, Playrix technical director.

“Lookout for Metrics has saved our team many hours of manual investigation and now notifications are viewed as actionable rather than noise, allowing our teams to easily focus on strategic priorities with less technical overhead,” he added.

“Working with almost a billion impressions every day to capture insights and intent for our customers, we need quick feedback on real data anomalies,” said Brian Ecker, a senior staff engineer at NextRoll, a marketing and data technology company with the mission to provide innovative solutions to companies to keep them growing.

“After working with the Lookout for Metrics team, we saw the improved accuracy that the new service can bring to our existing anomaly detection process and we are thrilled to start using it.”

It’s also worth noting that APN partners such as TensorIoT, Quantiphi, and Provectus have expertise in Lookout for Metrics and can help customers leverage its functionalities.

Available in Preview
Amazon Lookout for Metrics is now available in preview in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Europe (Ireland).

You can interact with the service using the AWS Management Console, the AWS SDKs and the CLI . Find out more on the technical documentation and get started quickly by joining the preview at the following link.

Request preview access to Amazon Lookout for Metrics here.

— Alex

New – Amazon SageMaker Clarify Detects Bias and Increases the Transparency of Machine Learning Models

Post Syndicated from Julien Simon original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-sagemaker-clarify-detects-bias-and-increases-the-transparency-of-machine-learning-models/

Today, I’m extremely happy to announce Amazon SageMaker Clarify, a new capability of Amazon SageMaker that helps customers detect bias in machine learning (ML) models, and increase transparency by helping explain model behavior to stakeholders and customers.

As ML models are built by training algorithms that learn statistical patterns present in datasets, several questions immediately come to mind. First, can we ever hope to explain why our ML model comes up with a particular prediction? Second, what if our dataset doesn’t faithfully describe the real-life problem we were trying to model? Could we even detect such issues? Would they introduce some sort of bias in imperceptible ways? As we will see, these are not speculative questions at all. They are very real, and their implications can be far-reaching.

Let’s start with the bias problem. Imagine that you’re working on a model detecting fraudulent credit card transactions. Fortunately, the huge majority of transactions are legitimate, and they make up 99.9% of your dataset, meaning that you only have 0.1% fraudulent transactions, say 100 out of 100,000. Training a binary classification model (legitimate vs. fraudulent), there’s a strong chance that it would be strongly influenced or biased by the majority group. In fact, a trivial model could simply decide that transactions are always legitimate: as useless as this model would be, it would still be right 99.9% of the time! This simple example shows how careful we have to be about the statistical properties of our data, and about the metrics that we use to measure model accuracy.

There are many variants of this under-representation problem. As the number of classes, features, and unique feature values increase, your dataset may only contain a tiny number of training instances for certain groups. In fact, some of these groups may correspond to various socially sensitive features such as gender, age range, or nationality. Under-representation for such groups could result in a disproportionate impact on their predicted outcomes.

Unfortunately, even with the best of intentions, bias issues may exist in datasets and be introduced into models with business, ethical, and regulatory consequences. It is thus important for model administrators to be aware of potential sources of bias in production systems.

Now, let’s discuss the explainability problem. For simple and well-understood algorithms like linear regression or tree-based algorithms, it’s reasonably easy to crack the model open, inspect the parameters that it learned during training, and figure out which features it predominantly uses. You can then decide whether this process is consistent with your business practices, basically saying: “yes, this is how a human expert would have done it.”

However, as models become more and more complex (I’m staring at you, deep learning), this kind of analysis becomes impossible. Just like the prehistoric tribes in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” we’re often left staring at an impenetrable monolith and wondering what it all means. Many companies and organizations may need ML models to be explainable before they can be used in production. In addition, some regulations may require explainability when ML models are used as part of consequential decision making, and closing the loop, explainability can also help detect bias.

Thus, our customers asked us for help on detecting bias in their datasets and their models, and on understanding how their models make predictions. We got to work, and came up with SageMaker Clarify.

Introducing Amazon SageMaker Clarify
SageMaker Clarify is a new set of capabilities for Amazon SageMaker, our fully managed ML service. It’s integrated with SageMaker Studio, our web-based integrated development environment for ML, as well as with other SageMaker capabilities like Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, Amazon SageMaker Experiments, and Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor.

Thanks to SageMaker Clarify, data scientists are able to:

  • Detect bias in datasets prior to training, and in models after training.
  • Measure bias using a variety of statistical metrics.
  • Explain how feature values contribute to the predicted outcome, both for the model overall and for individual predictions.
  • Detect bias drift and feature importance drift over time, thanks to the integration with Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor.

Let’s look at each of these capabilities.

Detecting dataset bias: This is an important first step. Indeed, a heavily biased dataset may well be unsuitable for training. Knowing this early on certainly saves you time, money, and frustration! Looking at bias metrics computed by SageMaker Clarify on your dataset, you can then add your own bias reduction techniques to your data processing pipeline. Once the dataset has been revised and processed, you can measure bias again, and check if it has actually decreased.

Detecting model bias: After you’ve trained your model, you can run a SageMaker Clarify bias analysis, which includes automatic deployment to a temporary endpoint, and computation of bias metrics using your model and dataset. By computing these metrics, you can figure out if your trained model has similar predictive behavior across groups.

Measuring bias: SageMaker Clarify lets you pick from many different bias metrics. I’ll just give you a few examples here.

  • Difference in positive proportions in labels (DPL): Are labels in the dataset correlated or not with specific sensitive feature values? For example, do people living in a certain city have a better chance of getting a positive answer?
  • Difference in positive proportions in predicted labels (DPPL): Do we overpredict positive labels for a certain group?
  • Accuracy difference (AD): Are the predictions by the model more accurate for one group than the other?
  • Counterfactuals – Fliptest (FT): Suppose we look at each member of one group, and compare with similar members from the other group. Do they get different model predictions?

Explaining predictions – to explain how your model predicts, SageMaker Clarify supports a popular technique called SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP). Originating in game theory, SHAP analyzes for each data instance the individual contribution of feature values to the predicted output, and represents them as a positive or negative value. For example, predicting with a credit application model, you could see that Alice’s application is approved with a score of 87.5%, that her employment status (+27.2%) and her credit score (+32.4%) are the strongest contributors to this score, and that her income level has a slight negative impact (-5%). Such insights are crucial in building trust that the model is working as expected, and in explaining to customers and regulators why it comes up with a particular prediction. Further analysis of the SHAP values for your complete dataset can also help identify the relative importance of features and feature values, potentially leading to the discovery of prediction issues and biases.

As you can see, SageMaker Clarify has some pretty powerful features for bias detection and explainability. Fortunately, it also makes them very easy to use. First, you should upload a clean and pre-processed copy of your tabular dataset (CSV or JSON) to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Then, using a built-in container, you just launch an Amazon SageMaker Processing job on your dataset, passing a short configuration file defining the name of the target attribute, the name and values of the sensitive columns to analyze for bias, and the bias metrics that you want to compute. As you would expect, this job runs on fully managed infrastructure. For post-training analysis, a temporary endpoint is also automatically created and deleted by the job. Once the job is complete, results are available in S3 and in SageMaker Studio, and include an auto-generated report that summarizes the results.

Now, I’d like to show you how to get started with SageMaker Clarify.

Exploring Datasets and Models with Amazon SageMaker Clarify
The German Credit Data dataset contains 1,000 labeled credit applications, which I’ve used to train a binary classification model with XGBoost. Each data instance has 20 features, such as credit purpose, credit amount, housing status, employment history, and more. Categorical features have been encoded with Axx values. For example, here’s how the credit history feature is encoded: A30 means ‘no credits taken’, A31 means ‘all credits at this bank paid back duly’, and so on.

In particular, the dataset includes a feature telling us if a customer is a foreign worker. In fact, a quick look at the dataset hints at a large imbalance in favor of foreign workers. Could bias be hiding there? What about the model? Did XGBoost increase or decrease the bias? Which features contribute most to the predicted output? Let’s find out.

After training the model, my next step is to run a SageMaker Clarify bias analysis job on the dataset, using a built-in container image that will compute bias metrics. The job inputs are the dataset, and a JSON configuration file that defines:

  • The name of the target attribute (Class1Good2Bad), and the value for the positive answer (1).
  • The sensitive features to analyze (called “facets”), and their value. Here, we want to focus on instances where ForeignWorker is set to 0, as they seem to be under-represented in the dataset.
  • The bias metrics that the job should compute. As I already have a model, I pass its name so that post-training metrics can be computed on a temporary endpoint.

Here’s the relevant snippet in the configuration file:

"label": "Class1Good2Bad",
"label_values_or_threshold": [1],
"facet": [
        {
         "name_or_index" : "ForeignWorker",
         "value_or_threshold": [0]
        }
    ],
. . .
"methods": {
    "pre_training_bias": {"methods": "all"}
    "post_training_bias": {"methods": "all"}
},
"predictor": {
        "model_name": "xgboost-german-model",
        "instance_type": "ml.m5.xlarge",
        "initial_instance_count": 1
    }

Then, I configure the job inputs (the dataset and the configuration file) and output (the report), passing all appropriate paths in S3:

config_input = ProcessingInput(
                    input_name="analysis_config",
                    source=analysis_config_s3_path,
                    destination="/opt/ml/processing/input/config")
data_input = ProcessingInput(
                    input_name="dataset",
                    source=train_data_s3_path,
                    destination="/opt/ml/processing/input/data")
result_output = ProcessingOutput(
                    source="/opt/ml/processing/output",
                    destination=analysis_result_s3_path,
                    output_name="analysis_result")

Finally, I run the processing job.

from sagemaker.processing import Processor, ProcessingInput, ProcessingJob, ProcessingOutput
analyzer_image_uri = f'678264136642.dkr.ecr.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/sagemaker-xai-analyzer:latest'
analyzer = Processor(base_job_name='analyzer',
                     image_uri=analyzer_image_uri,
                     role=sagemaker.get_execution_role(),
                     instance_count=1,
                     instance_type='ml.c5.xlarge')
analyzer.run(inputs=[ data_input, config_input], outputs=[result_output])

Once the processing job is complete, I can retrieve the report. Let’s look at bias metrics.

Detecting Bias with Amazon SageMaker Clarify
Here are some of the pre-training bias metrics:

"ForeignWorker": [
    {
     "value_or_threshold": "0",
     "metrics": [
      {
       "name": "CI",
       "description": "Class Imbalance (CI)",
       "value": 0.9225
      },
      {
       "name": "DPL",
       "description": "Difference in Positive Proportions in Labels (DPL)",
       "value": -0.21401904442300435
      },
. . . 

The class imbalance metric confirms our visual impression. The dataset has about 92% more foreign workers than it has domestic workers to assess. Whether this imbalance is responsible or not, we can also see that the difference in positive proportion for domestic workers is quite negative. In other words, there’s a smaller proportion of domestic workers with positive labels. This statistical pattern could be picked up by an ML algorithm, leading to a larger proportion of domestic workers getting negative answers. Figuring out whether this is actually legitimate or not would require further analysis, and in any case, it’s great that SageMaker Clarify warned us about this potential issue.

As I provided a trained model, post-training metrics are also available. Comparing the DPPL and the DPL, I can see that XGBoost has slightly reduced bias on positive proportions (-18.8% vs -21.4%). We also see that DAR is negative, indicating that the model achieves higher precision for domestic workers compared to foreign workers.

"ForeignWorker": [
    {
     "value_or_threshold": "0",
     "metrics": [
      {
       "name": "DPPL",
       "description": "\"Difference in Positive Proportions in Predicted Labels (DPPL)\")",
       "value": -0.18801124208230213
      },
      {
       "name": "DAR",
       "description": "Difference in Acceptance Rates (DAR)",
       "value": -0.050909090909090904
      },
      {
       "name": "DRR",
       "description": "Difference in Rejection Rates (DRR)",
       "value": 0.0365296803652968
      },
. . .

As SageMaker Clarify is integrated with SageMaker Studio, I can visualize bias metrics there. All I have to do is find the processing job in the list of trials, right-click “Open in trial details”, and select the “Bias report” view.

SageMaker screenshot

Finally, deciding whether high value of a certain bias metric is problematic involves domain-specific considerations. This needs to be guided by ethical, social, regulatory, and business considerations. Similarly, interventions for removing bias may often need a careful analysis of the entire ML lifecycle, from problem formulation to feedback loops in deployment.

Now, let’s see how SageMaker Clarify helps us understand what features the models base their predictions on.

Explaining Predictions with Amazon SageMaker Clarify
The report includes global SHAP values, showing the relative importance of all the features in the dataset. On the feature importance graph available in SageMaker Studio, I see that the three most important features are credit duration, not having a checking account (A14), and the loan amount. All things being equal, the bank probably sees you as a safer customer if you’re borrowing a small amount over a short period of time, and without the possibility to write checks!

SageMaker screenshot

In S3, I can also find a CSV file with SHAP values for individual data instances, giving me a complete picture of feature and feature value importance.

Getting Started
As you can see, SageMaker Clarify is a powerful tool to detect bias and to understand how your model works. You can start using it today in all regions where Amazon SageMaker is available, at no additional cost.

Sample notebooks are available to get you started quickly. Give them a try, and let us know what you think. We’re always looking forward to your feedback, either through your usual AWS support contacts, or on the AWS Forum for SageMaker.

– Julien

Special thanks to my colleagues Sanjiv Das, Michele Donini, Jason Gelman, Krishnaram Kenthapadi, Pinar Yilmaz, and Bilal Zafar for their precious help.

Dataset credits: Dua, D. and Graff, C. (2019). UCI Machine Learning Repository. Irvine, CA: University of California, School of Information and Computer Science.

New – Profile Your Machine Learning Training Jobs With Amazon SageMaker Debugger

Post Syndicated from Julien Simon original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/profile-your-machine-learning-training-jobs-with-amazon-sagemaker-debugger/

Today, I’m extremely happy to announce that Amazon SageMaker Debugger can now profile machine learning models, making it much easier to identify and fix training issues caused by hardware resource usage.

Despite its impressive performance on a wide range of business problems, machine learning (ML) remains a bit of a mysterious topic. Getting things right is an alchemy of science, craftsmanship (some would say wizardry), and sometimes luck. In particular, model training is a complex process whose outcome depends on the quality of your dataset, your algorithm, its parameters, and the infrastructure you’re training on.

As ML models become ever larger and more complex (I’m looking at you, deep learning), one growing issue is the amount of infrastructure required to train them. For instance, training BERT on the publicly available COCO dataset takes well over six hours on a single p3dn.24xlarge instance, even with its eight NVIDIA V100 GPUs. Some customers like autonomous vehicle companies deal with much larger datasets, and train object detection models for several days.

When a complex training job takes this long, the odds that something goes wrong and ruins it are pretty high, not only wasting time and money but also causing lots of frustration. Important work needs to be put on the back burner while you investigate, figure out the root cause, try to fix it, and then run your training job again. Often, you’ll have to iterate quite a few times to nail the problem.

Depending on the ML framework that you use, and sometimes on its version, you may or may not be able to use existing framework-specific tools. Often, you’ll have to build and maintain your own bespoke tools. Even for experienced practitioners, this is a lot of hard work. For regular developers like me, this is an utterly daunting task.

Introducing Model Profiling in Amazon SageMaker Debugger
Launched last year at AWS re:Invent, Amazon SageMaker Debugger is a capability of Amazon SageMaker that automatically identifies complex issues developing in ML training jobs. These include loss not decreasing, exploding gradients, and more.

Now, SageMaker Debugger can also monitor hardware resource usage, and allows you to profile your training job to help you correlate resource usage to ML operations in your training script. Thus, you’ll be able to resolve performance issues much quicker, and iterate through your training job much faster.

Chaim Rand, ML Algorithm Developer at Mobileye, an Intel company building automated driving and driver assistance systems, had the opportunity to work with the new profiling capabilities, and here’s what he told us: “Many of the assisted driving and autonomous vehicle technologies that we develop at Mobileye, rely on training deep neural network models to detect a wide variety of road artifacts, including vehicles, pedestrians, speed bumps, road signs and more. Often, these models train on extremely large datasets, on multiple machines, and for periods of up to several days. For us, at Mobileye, it is imperative that we have a toolkit of advanced performance profiling capabilities, for analyzing the flow of data across the network, CPU, and GPU resources, and for pinpointing performance issues. The profiling functionality in SageMaker Debugger provides just that, taking performance profiling out of the domain of a few specialized experts, and empowering our algorithm developers to maximize training resource utilization, accelerate model convergence, and reduce cost.”

At launch, the new profiling capability of SageMaker Debugger is available for TensorFlow 2.x and PyTorch 1.x. All you have to do is to train with the corresponding built-in frameworks in Amazon SageMaker. Distributed training is supported out of the box.

Setting a single parameter in your SageMaker estimator, and without any change to your training code, you can enable the collection of infrastructure and model metrics such as:

  • CPU and GPU,
  • RAM and GPU RAM,
  • Network I/O,
  • Storage I/O (local storage and Pipe Mode),
  • Python metrics,
  • Data loading time,
  • Time spent in ML operators running on CPU and GPU,
  • Distributed training metrics for Horovod,
  • and many more.

In addition, you can visualize how much time is spent in different phases, such as preprocessing, training loop, and postprocessing. If needed, you can drill down on each training epoch, and even on each function in your training script.

By default, metrics are collected every 500ms, and you can also set this value to 100ms, 200ms, 1s, 5s, and 1min. For finer-grained analysis, you can also enable and disable profiling explicitly in your training code, only capturing metrics for specific parts.

While your training job is running, you can easily visualize these metrics in Amazon SageMaker Studio, our web-based integrated development environment for ML. As you would expect, all data is also available through the SageMaker Debugger API, and you can retrieve it to build your own graphs.

Running in parallel of the training job, an Amazon SageMaker Processing analyzes captured data, builds graphs, and generates a report providing insights on potential problems. This doesn’t require any work on your part, as this analysis runs inside a built-in container on fully managed infrastructure.

Now, let’s run a demo with PyTorch, where we’ll profile a ResNet-50 image classification model training on the CIFAR-10 dataset.

Profiling a Training Job with Amazon SageMaker Debugger
All it takes to enable profiling on your training job is an extra parameter in your SageMaker estimator. You don’t need to change a line in your training code. By default, SageMaker Debugger uses a set of built-in profiling rules looking for unwanted conditions that could develop during training, such as low GPU utilization. On top of reporting these conditions, SageMaker Debugger also triggers events in CloudWatch Events. For example, I could use them to run a AWS Lambda function that automatically stops inefficient training jobs.

First, I create a profiling configuration capturing data every 500ms. Optionally, I could select a training step interval if I wanted to profile only a certain portion of the job.

import sagemaker
from sagemaker.profiler import ProfilerConfig 
profiler_config = ProfilerConfig(profiling_interval_millis=500)

Then, I pass this configuration to my PyTorch Estimator, training on an ml.p3.8xlarge instance equipped with 4 NVIDIA V100 GPUs.

from sagemaker.pytorch import PyTorch
estimator = PyTorch(
    role=sagemaker.get_execution_role(),
    instance_count=1,
    instance_type='ml.p3.8xlarge',
    entry_point='train_pt.py',
    framework_version='1.5.0',
    hyperparameters={"batch_size":512, "epochs":10},
    profiler_config=profiler_config)

Then, I launch the training job as usual. Once the job is running, profiling data is captured and stored in S3.

path = estimator.latest_job_profiler_artifacts_path()
print(path)
s3://sagemaker-us-east-2-123456789012/pt-train-pt-2020-11-17-17-38-43-231/profiler-output

Using the SageMaker SDK, I can retrieve and count profiling events.

from smdebug.profiler.system_metrics_reader import S3SystemMetricsReader
system_metrics_reader = S3SystemMetricsReader(path)
system_metrics_reader.refresh_event_file_list()
last_timestamp = system_metrics_reader.get_timestamp_of_latest_available_file()
events = system_metrics_reader.get_events(0, last_timestamp)
print("Found", len(events), "recorded system metric events. Latest recorded event:", last_timestamp)
Found 411853 recorded system metric events. Latest recorded event: 1605620280000000

Of course, I could parse and analyze these profiling events, build my own graphs, and so on. Instead, let’s visualize them in near real-time in SageMaker Studio.

While my training job is still running, I locate it in SageMaker Studio, and I right-click “Open Debugger for insights”.

SageMaker screenshot

This opens a new tab, and I select the “Nodes” panel where I can see details statistics for each instance in my training job. So, how’s my training job doing? Feel free to click on the image below to zoom in.

SageMaker screenshot

Apparently, this job isn’t going great. GPU utilization and GPU memory utilization are desperately flat at around 10%. I’m definitely not pushing my multi-GPU instance hard enough. Maybe GPUs are not receiving data fast enough because the CPU can’t keep up? Let’s check the system utilization heatmap.

SageMaker screenshot

The CPU is taking a nap here, hardly ever exceeding 20% usage. This instance is definitely not busy enough. Is there anything I could do to fix this?

Switching to the “Overview” panel, I see that some of the built-in profiling rules have been triggered.

SageMaker screenshot

LowGPUUtilization confirms what I saw on the graphs above. BatchSize is very interesting, as it suggests increasing the size of mini-batches sent to the GPUs by the training script running on the CPU. This should definitely help fill GPU memory, put more GPU cores to work, speed up my training job, and improve infrastructure usage.

At this point, I should decide to stop my inefficient training job, and to relaunch it with a larger batch size. Here, I’ll let it run to completion to show you the report generated by the SageMaker Processing job running in parallel of your training job.

Once the training job is complete, I can see its summary in the “Overview” panel.

SageMaker screenshot

Clicking on the “Download report” button, I get a very detailed report that includes additional metrics, for example the ratio between the different phases of the training job, or the ratio between the forward and backward pass.

SageMaker screenshot

I can also see information on the most time-consuming CPU and GPU operators, which is really important if I wanted to optimize my code. For example, the graph below tells me that the most time-consuming GPU operations in my training job are backward pass convolution operators.

SageMaker screenshot

There’s much more to read in the report (rules summary, training loop analysis, and more). A companion notebook is also available to understand how graphs have been built, and how you can tailor them to your own needs.

Getting Started
We’ve just scratched the surface, and there are many more features in Amazon SageMaker Debugger that make it easy to gather, analyze and visualize model profiling information. You can start using it today in all regions where Amazon SageMaker is available. You won’t be charged for any compute used to run built-in profiling rules.

You’ll find sample notebooks on Github, so give them a try, and let us know what you think. We’re always looking forward to your feedback, either through your usual AWS support contacts, or on the AWS Forum for SageMaker.

– Julien

New – Managed Data Parallelism in Amazon SageMaker Simplifies Training on Large Datasets

Post Syndicated from Julien Simon original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/managed-data-parallelism-in-amazon-sagemaker-simplifies-training-on-large-datasets/

Today, I’m particularly happy to announce that Amazon SageMaker now supports a new data parallelism library that makes it easier to train models on datasets that may be as large as hundreds or thousands of gigabytes.

As data sets and models grow larger and more sophisticated, machine learning (ML) practitioners working on large distributed training jobs have to face increasingly long training times, even when using powerful instances such as the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) p3 and p4 instances. For example, using a ml.p3dn.24xlarge instance equipped with 8 NVIDIA V100 GPUs, it takes over 6 hours to train advanced object detection models such as Mask RCNN and Faster RCNN on the publicly available COCO dataset. Likewise, training BERT, a state of the art natural language processing model, takes over 100 hours on the same instance. Some of our customers, such as autonomous vehicle companies, routinely deal with even larger training jobs that run for days on large GPU clusters.

As you can imagine, these long training times are a severe bottleneck for ML projects, hurting productivity and slowing down innovation. Customers asked us for help, and we got to work.

Introducing Data Parallelism in Amazon SageMaker
Amazon SageMaker now helps ML teams reduce distributed training time and cost, thanks to the SageMaker Data Parallelism (SDP) library. Available for TensorFlow and PyTorch, SDP implements a more efficient distribution of computation, optimizes network communication, and fully utilizes our fastest p3 and p4 GPU instances.

Up to 90% of GPU resources can now be used for training, not for data transfer. Distributed training jobs can achieve up near-liner scaling efficiency, regardless of the number of GPUs involved. In other words, if a training job runs for 8 hours on a single instance, it will only take approximately 1 hour on 8 instances, with minimal cost increase. SageMaker effectively eliminates any trade-off between training cost and training time, allowing ML teams to get results sooner, iterate faster, and accelerate innovation.

During his keynote at AWS re:Invent 2020, Swami Sivasubramanian demonstrated the fastest training times to date for T5-3B and Mask-RCNN.

  • The T5-3B model has 3 billion parameters, achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on natural language processing benchmarks, and usually takes weeks of effort to train and tune for performance. We trained this model in 6 days on 256 ml.p4d.24xlarge instances.
  • Mask-RCNN continues to be a popular instance segmentation model used by our customers. Last year at re:Invent, we trained Mask-RCNN in 26 minutes on PyTorch, and in 27 minutes on TensorFlow. This year, we recorded the fastest training time to date for Mask-RCNN at 6:12 minutes on TensorFlow, and 6:45 minutes on PyTorch.

Before we explain how Amazon SageMaker is able to achieve such speedups, let’s first explain how data parallelism works, and why it’s hard to scale.

A Primer on Data Parallelism
If you’re training a model on a single GPU, its full internal state is available locally: model parameters, optimizer parameters, gradients (parameter updates computed by backpropagation), and so on. However, things are different when you distribute a training job to a cluster of GPUs.

Using a technique named “data parallelism,” the training set is split in mini-batches that are evenly distributed across GPUs. Thus, each GPU only trains the model on a fraction of the total data set. Obviously, this means that the model state will be slightly different on each GPU, as they will process different batches. In order to ensure training convergence, the model state needs to be regularly updated on all nodes. This can be done synchronously or asynchronously:

  • Synchronous training: all GPUs report their gradient updates either to all other GPUs (many-to-many communication), or to a central parameter server that redistributes them (many-to-one, followed by one-to-many). As all updates are applied simultaneously, the model state is in sync on all GPUs, and the next mini-batch can be processed.
  • Asynchronous training: gradient updates are sent to all other nodes, or to a central server. However, they are applied immediately, meaning that model state will differ from one GPU to the next.

Unfortunately, these techniques don’t scale very well. As the number of GPUs increases, a parameter server will inevitably become a bottleneck. Even without a parameter server, network congestion soon becomes a problem, as n GPUs need to exchange n*(n-1) messages after each iteration, for a total amount of n*(n-1)*model size bytes. For example, ResNet-50 is a popular model used in computer vision applications. With its 26 million parameters, each 32-bit gradient update takes about 100 megabytes. With 8 GPUs, each iteration requires sending and receiving 56 updates, for a total of 5.6 gigabytes. Even with a fast network, this will cause some overhead, and slow down training.

A significant step forward was taken in 2017 thanks to the Horovod project. Horovod implemented an optimized communication algorithm for distributed training named “ring-allreduce,” which was soon integrated with popular deep learning libraries.

In a nutshell, ring-allreduce is a decentralized asynchronous algorithm. There is no parameter server: nodes are organized in a directed cycle graph (to put it simply, a one-way ring). For each iteration, a node receives a gradient update from its predecessor. Once a node has processed its own batch, it applies both updates (its own and the one it received), and sends the results to its neighbor. With n GPUs, each GPU processes 2*(n-1) messages before all GPUs have been updated. Accordingly, the total amount of data exchanged per GPU is 2*(n-1)*model size, which is much better than n*(n-1)*model size.

Still, as datasets keep growing, the network bottleneck issue often rises again. Enter SageMaker and its new AllReduce algorithm.

A New Data Parallelism Algorithm in Amazon SageMaker
With the AllReduce algorithm, GPUs don’t talk to one another any more. Each GPU stores its gradient updates in GPU memory. When a certain threshold is exceeded, these updates are sharded, and sent to parameter servers running on the CPUs of the GPU instances. This removes the need for dedicated parameter servers.

Each CPU is responsible for a subset of the model parameters, and it receives updates coming from all GPUs. For example, with 3 training instances equipped with a single GPU, each GPU in the training cluster would send a third of its gradient updates to each one of the three CPUs.

Illustration

Then, each CPU would apply all the gradient updates that it received, and it would distributes the consolidated result back to all GPUs.

Illustration

Now that we understand how this algorithm works, let’s see how you can use it with your own code, without having to manage any infrastructure.

Training with Data Parallelism in Amazon SageMaker
The SageMaker Data Parallelism API is designed for ease of use, and should provide seamless integration with existing distributed training toolkits. In most cases, all you have to change in your training code is the import statement for Horovod (TensorFlow), or for Distributed Data Parallel (PyTorch).

For PyTorch, this would look like this.

import smdistributed.dataparallel.torch.parallel.distributed as dist
dist.init_process_group()

Then, I need to pin each GPU to a single SDP process.

torch.cuda.set_device(dist.get_local_rank())

Then, I define my model as usual, for example:

class Net(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self):
        super(Net, self).__init__()
        self.conv1 = nn.Conv2d(1, 32, 3, 1)
        self.conv2 = nn.Conv2d(32, 64, 3, 1)
        self.dropout1 = nn.Dropout2d(0.25)
        self.dropout2 = nn.Dropout2d(0.5)
        self.fc1 = nn.Linear(9216, 128)
        self.fc2 = nn.Linear(128, 10)
...

Finally, I instantiate my model, and use it to create a DistributedDataParallel object like so:

import torch
from smdistributed.dataparallel.torch.parallel.distributed import DistributedDataParallel as DDP
device = torch.device("cuda")
model = DDP(Net().to(device))

The rest of the code is vanilla PyTorch, and I can train it using the PyTorch estimator available in the SageMaker SDK. Here, I’m using an ml.p3.16xlarge instance with 8 NVIDIA V100 GPUs.

from sagemaker.pytorch import PyTorch
estimator = PyTorch(
    entry_point='train_pytorch.py',
    role=sagemaker.get_execution_role(),
    framework_version='1.6.0',
    instance_count=1,
    instance_type='ml.p3.16xlarge',
    distribution={'smdistributed':{'dataparallel':{enabled': True}}}
)
estimator.fit()

From then on, SageMaker takes over and provisions all required infrastructure. You can focus on other tasks while your training job runs.

Getting Started
If your training jobs last for hours or days on multiple GPUs, we believe that the SageMaker Data Parallelism library can save you time and money, and help you experiment and innovate quicker. It’s available today at in all regions where SageMaker is available, at no additional cost.

Examples are available to get you started quickly. Give them a try, and let us know what you think. We’re always looking forward to your feedback, either through your usual AWS support contacts, or on the AWS Forum for SageMaker.

– Julien

New AWS Workbook for Australian energy sector customers now available

Post Syndicated from Julian Busic original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/new-aws-workbook-for-australian-energy-sector-customers-now-available/

I’m pleased to announce the Amazon Web Services (AWS) AESCSF 2019 Workbook, a resource designed to help energy sector customers align with the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO)’s Australian Energy Sector Cyber Security Framework (AESCSF) 2019.

The workbook helps energy sector customers to:

The AESCSF 2019 framework comprises 11 domains. Each domain contains one or more objectives, with each objective broken down into specific individual practices. Nine of the 11 domains also contain examples of anti-patterns or specific indicators of bad practice.

The AEMO describes the AESCSF 2019 framework as:

“focussed on cyber security maturity and […] therefore not prescriptive in relation to security controls. It describes what your organisation should strive to achieve, but not how they should achieve it.”

Although the framework is not prescriptive, the AEMO has provided a selection of Australian and global informative references mapped to each practice to support organizations seeking control suggestions or recommendations. These references include the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) Essential Eight, specific controls from the Australian Government Information Security Manual (ISM), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 27001:2013, and the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs). For further detail, see the AESCSF Framework overview.

It’s important to note that security and compliance is a shared responsibility between AWS and our customers. AWS is responsible for the security of the cloud (that is, the infrastructure that runs all of the services in the AWS Cloud) but customers are responsible for the security of the systems and applications they deploy in the cloud.

The AWS AESCSF 2019 Workbook helps customers align with the AESCSF 2019 framework by providing control mappings for:

The AWS AESCSF 2019 Workbook does not provide mappings to the anti-patterns, because these are specifically focused on helping customers identify bad practices within their organizations.

The downloadable workbook contains two embedded formats:

  • Microsoft Excel – Coverage includes AWS responsibility control statements and Well-Architected Framework best practices.
  • Dynamic HTML – Coverage is the same as in the Microsoft Excel format, with the added feature that the Well-Architected Framework best practices are mapped to AWS Config managed rules and Amazon GuardDuty findings, where available or applicable.

The workbook is available for download through AWS Artifact, accessible through your AWS account.

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

Want more AWS Security how-to content, news, and feature announcements? Follow us on Twitter.

Author

Julian Busic

Julian is a Security Solutions Architect with a focus on regulatory engagement. He works with our customers, their regulators, and AWS teams to help customers raise the bar on secure cloud adoption and usage. Julian has over 15 years of experience working in risk and technology across the financial services industry in Australia and New Zealand.

re:Invent 2020 Liveblog: Machine Learning Keynote

Post Syndicated from AWS News Blog Team original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/reinvent-2020-liveblog-machine-learning-keynote/

Swami Sivasubramanian speaks on stage at AWS re:InventFollow along as AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr and Developer Advocates Martin Beeby and Steve Roberts liveblog the first-ever Machine Learning Keynote. Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Amazon ML/AI will share the latest developments and launches in AWS machine learning, as well as demos of new technology, and insights from customers.

Join us here from 7:45-10 AM (PST), Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2020! 

 


New – SaaS Lens in AWS Well-Architected Tool

Post Syndicated from Danilo Poccia original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-saas-lens-in-aws-well-architected-tool/

To help you build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient solutions on AWS, in 2015 we publicly launched the AWS Well-Architected Framework. It started as a single whitepaper but has expanded to include domain-specific lenses, hands-on labs, and the AWS Well-Architected Tool (available at no cost in the AWS Management Console) that provides a mechanism for regularly evaluating your workloads, identifying high risk issues, and recording your improvements.

To offer more workload-specific advice, in 2017 we extended the framework with the concept of “lens” to go beyond a general perspective and enter specific technology domains. Now, to help accelerate building Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions, the AWS SaaS Factory team has led an effort to build a new AWS Well-Architected SaaS Lens.

SaaS is a licensing and delivery model by which software is centrally managed and hosted by a provider and available to customers on a subscription basis. In this way, software providers can innovate rapidly, optimize their costs, and gain operational efficiencies. At the same time, customers benefit from simplified IT management, speed, and a pay-for-what-you-use business model.

The Well-Architected SaaS Lens adds questions to the tool that are tailored to SaaS workloads and intended to drive critical thinking for developing and operating SaaS workloads. Each question has a list of best practices, and each best practice has a list of improvement plans to help guide you in implementing them. AWS Solution Architects from the AWS SaaS Factory Program, having worked with thousands of software developers and AWS Partners, view these well-architected patterns as a key component of building and operating a SaaS architecture on AWS.

Using the SaaS Lens in the Well-Architected Tool
In the Well-Architected Tool console, I start by defining my workload. Today, I’m reviewing a pre-production environment of a SaaS application. It’s just a minimum viable product (MVP) version of what I want to build, with just enough features to be usable and get a first feedback.

Now, I can choose which lenses to apply. The AWS Well-Architected Framework is there by default. I select the SaaS Lens. This is adding a set of additional questions that help me understand how to design, deploy, and architect my SaaS workload following the framework best practices. Other lenses are available in the tool, for example the Serverless Lens described here.

Now, I start my review. Many questions in the SaaS Lens are focused on how you are managing a multi-tenant application. This is the first question for the Operational Excellence pillar. I can also add some notes to explain my answer better or take note of what I want to improve.

I don’t need to answer all questions to start improving my SaaS application. For example, this is the improvement plan based on my answer to the previous question. For each point here, I can click and get more information on how to implement that on AWS.

Moving to the Reliability pillar, I feel more confident because of the techniques I used to separate individual tenants of my SaaS application in their own “sandbox” environment.

As I expect, no risks are detected this time!

When I finish reviewing the SaaS Lens for my workload, I get an overview of the detected risks. Here, I can also save a milestone that I can use later to compare my status and estimate my improvements.

Just below that, I get a suggestion on what to focus on next. Again, I can click and get in-depth suggestion on how to mitigate the risk.

As often happens in IT services, this is an iterative process. The AWS Well-Architected Tool helps quantify the risks and gives me a path to follow to continuously improve my SaaS application.

Available Now
The SaaS Lens is available today in all regions where the AWS Well-Architected Tool is offered, as described in the AWS Regional Services List. It can be applied to existing workloads, or used for new workloads you define in the tool.

There are no costs in using the AWS Well-Architected Tool; you can use it to improve the application you are working on, or to get visibility into multiple workloads used by the department or area you are working with.

Learn more about the new SaaS Lens and get started today with the AWS Well-Architected Tool!

— Danilo

AWS Marketplace Now Offers Professional Services

Post Syndicated from Marcia Villalba original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-marketplace-now-offers-professional-services/

Now with AWS Marketplace, customers can not only find and buy third-party software but also the professional services needed to support the full lifecycle of those products, including planning, deployment and support. This simplifies the software supply chain including tasks like managing provider relationships and procurement processes and also consolidates billing and invoices in one place.

Until today, customers have used AWS Marketplace for buying software and then used a separate process for contracting professional services. Many customers need extra professional services when they purchase third-party software, like premium support, implementation, or training. The additional effort to support different procurement processes impacts customers’ project timelines and adds a lot complexity to the customer’s organization.

Last year we announced AWS IQ, a service that helps you engage with AWS Certified third-party experts for AWS project work. This year we want to go one step further and help you find professional services for all those third-party software solutions you currently buy from AWS Marketplace.

For the Buyers
Buyers can now discover professional services using AWS Marketplace from multiple trusted sellers, manage the invoices and payments from software and services together and reduce procurement time, accelerating the process from months to days.

This new feature allow buyers to choose from a selection of professional services such as assessments, implementation, premium support, and managed services and training from consulting partners, managed service providers and independent software vendors.

To get started finding and buying professional services, first you need to find the right service for you. If you are looking for a professional service associated with a particular piece of software, using the search tool in AWS Marketplace, you can search for the software and the related professional services will appear in the search results. Use the delivery method to filter the results to just include professional services.

Screenshot of searching for professional services

After you find the service you are looking for, you can visit the service details page and learn more information about the listing. If you want to buy the service, just click continue.

Screenshot of service page

That will open the request service form where you can connect to the seller and request the service. The seller will receive a notification and then they can contact you to agree on the scope of the work including deliverables, milestones, pricing, payment schedules, and service terms.

Screenshot of request service form

Once you agree with the seller on all the specific details of the contract, the seller sends you a private offer. Now the offer page will show the private offer details instead of a request for service form. You can review the pricing, payment schedule, and contract terms and create the contract.

Screenshot of private offer

The service subscription starts after you review and accept the private offer on AWS Marketplace. Also, you will receive an invoice from AWS Marketplace and you can track your subscriptions in the buyers management console. The purchases of the services are itemized on your AWS invoice, simplifying payments and cost management.

For the Sellers
This new feature of AWS Marketplace enables you, the seller, to grow your business and reach new customers by listing your professional service offerings. You can list professional services offerings as individual products or alongside existing software products in AWS Marketplace using pricing, payment schedule, and service terms that are independent from the software.

In AWS Marketplace you will create your seller page, where all your information as a seller will be displayed to the potential buyers.

Public professional service listings are discoverable by search and visible in your seller profile. You will receive customer requests for each of the services listed. Agree with the customer on the details of the service contract and then send a private offer to them.

Screenshot for creating a professional service

AWS Marketplace will invoice and collect the payments from the customers and distribute the funds to your bank account after the customers pay. AWS Marketplace also offers you seller reports that are updated daily to understand how your business is doing.

Availability
To learn more about buying and selling professional services in AWS Marketplace, visit the AWS Marketplace service page. 

— Marcia

re:Invent 2020 Liveblog: Partner Keynote

Post Syndicated from AWS News Blog Team original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/reinvent-2020-liveblog-partner-keynote/

Join us Thursday, Dec. 3, from 7:45-9:30 a.m., for the AWS Partner Keynote with Doug Yeum, head of Worldwide Channels and Alliances; Sandy Carter, vice president, Global Public Sector Partners and Programs; and Dave McCann, vice president, AWS Migration, Marketplace, and Control Services. Developer Advocates Steve Roberts and Martin Beeby will be liveblogging all the announcements and discussion.

See you at 7:45 a.m. (PST) Thursday!

— Steve & — Martin

 


New – Amazon S3 Replication Adds Support for Multiple Destination Buckets

Post Syndicated from Marcia Villalba original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-s3-replication-adds-support-for-multiple-destination-buckets/

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) supports many types of replication, including S3 Same-Region Replication (SRR), which launched in 2019 and S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR), which has been around since 2015. Today, we are happy to announce S3 Replication support for multiple destination buckets. S3 Replication now gives you the ability to replicate data from one source bucket to multiple destination buckets. With S3 Replication (multi-destination) you can replicate data in the same AWS Regions using S3 SRR or across different AWS Regions by using S3 CRR, or a combination of both.

Before this launch, if you needed to have multiple copies of your data in different S3 buckets, you had to build your own S3 replication service by monitoring S3 events, identifying created objects, and using AWS Lambda functions to copy objects to each destination bucket.

This launch removes the need for you to develop your own solutions to replicate the data across multiple destinations. You can use the flexibility of S3 Replication (multi-destination) to store multiple copies of your data in different storage classes, with different encryption types, or across different accounts depending on its intended use. Additionally, when replicating to multiple destinations, you can use CloudWatch metrics to track replication progress for each region pair.

S3 Replication (multi-destination) is an extension to S3 Replication, and it supports all existing S3 Replication features like Replication Time Control (RTC) and delete marker replication. If you need a predictable replication time backed by a Service Level Agreement, you can use RTC to replicate objects in less than 15 minutes.

How to Get Started With S3 Replication (multi-destination)
In order to get S3 Replication working, all the buckets involved in the replication (source and destinations) must have bucket versioning enabled.

To setup S3 Replication (multi-destination), you need to define replication rules. You can create a new rule in the bucket Management page, under Replication Rules.

Screenshot of adding a rule

When creating a new replication rule, one very important step is to set up permissions for replication, as S3 will need to replicate objects on your behalf. To do that, you can follow the instructions available in the S3 documentation page.

To create the replication rule, just follow the steps in the console. You can specify to which objects of the bucket this rule applies, the destination bucket, if you want to change the storage class of the replicated objects and many other preferences for your replicated objects.

Screenshot configuring the replication rule

One thing to have in mind when activating a rule is that the replication will start for all new objects added to the bucket from that moment. Objects uploaded to the bucket before the rule was created need to be copied using one time operations like S3 batch operations or S3 copy.

If you want to monitor the progress of your replication using CloudWatch metrics, don’t forget to click the Replication metrics and notifications checkbox.

Screenshot of configuring replication rules metrics

Now that we support multiple destinations for replication, rule priorities are used when there are two or more rules with the same destination. When that happens, the rule with the highest priority will be applied. For the same destination bucket, a lower priority rule will not be applied when the replication configuration has two or more rules with overlapping scope. If there are two or more rules with the same scope and different destinations, both rules will be applied.

You can see a summary of all your rules in the Replication rules listing under the bucket Management page.

Screenshot of replication rules listing

Monitoring Replication
When you have all the rules configured, you can start uploading objects to the source bucket and monitor how they get replicated in all the different destinations.

To know the replication status of an object in the source bucket, you can see the Replication status in the object Details. The status types are:

  • COMPLETED: The replication was successful in all the destinations.
  • PENDING: The replication is still in progress.
  • FAILED: The replication failed to replicate in at least one of the destinations. When there is a failure in replication, the only way to fix it is by uploading the object again.

screenshot of object metadata

For replicated objects, you will see the REPLICA status under the Replication status.

You can also use CloudWatch metrics to monitor the replication. First, you need to enable metrics for each of the rules. And then in the bucket Metrics, you can choose which rules you want to see the metrics of and see the charts for each of them; the metrics are also available in the CloudWatch console.

Screenshot of replication metrics

Availability
S3 Replication (multi-destination) is available today in all AWS Regions. To get started, you can use the AWS Management Console, SDKs, S3 API, or AWS CloudFormation to create replication rules from one source bucket to multiple destination buckets.

Pricing for S3 Replication (multi-destination) applies for each rule. For pricing information, please visit the Amazon S3 pricing page.

For more information about this new feature visit the S3 Replication page.

— Marcia

 

New AWS Amplify Admin UI Helps You Develop App Backends, No Cloud Experience Required

Post Syndicated from Marcia Villalba original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-amplify-admin-ui-helps-you-develop-app-backends-no-cloud-experience-required/

Today AWS Amplify announces new Admin UI to configure an application backend, and manage app users and content outside the AWS console. This new feature makes it easier to use AWS services and accelerates the development and management of full-stack web and mobile apps.

We launched AWS Amplify in November 2018, and since then it has been helping front-end web and mobile developers to quickly develop and deploy cloud-connected web and mobile applications. In order to stay ahead of the curve and deliver innovation to customers, businesses need to ship features fast. However, developers and non-developers who are unfamiliar with AWS fundamentals require training, which slows the entire process down.

AWS Amplify today launches a new Admin UI that enables team members to interface with AWS without requiring an AWS account (only the first deployment requires an AWS account).

The Admin UI provides simple yet powerful tools to model database tables, add authentication and authorization, and manage app content, users, and groups. It also offers the ability to manage the application users and content. The AWS Amplify Admin UI focuses on data types rather than backend infrastructure. All the backend resources generate infrastructure as code (IaC) templates that can be committed in the team repository and integrated with AWS Amplify continuous deployment workflow to manage the different environments.

Let’s Look at an Example Using the New AWS Amplify Admin UI
Imagine that you are a front-end web developer creating a website for a local restaurant. The restaurant owner wants to have a website where they can show their daily menu, and wants a simple way to update the content of the page every day.

There are many ways to solve this problem. You can spin up a server and install a CMS for the restaurant owner to manage the menu. For this particular use case, having a server exclusively to do this is just over-provisioning resources. Or, you can create the CMS yourself using serverless tools; however, this adds a lot of complexity and extra time to the development cycle.

Another option is to use the new AWS Amplify Admin UI that allows you to take advantage of many AWS managed services to create the backend quickly and also provides the ability to manage the application users and content.

The first thing you need to do is to create a new AWS Amplify app backend in the AWS Console. AWS Amplify will create a backend environment called staging. When, your app backend is ready, open the new Admin UI. If you would like to get another developer working on this application who doesn’t have experience with AWS, nor access to the AWS account, now you can grant access to them so they can continue the work on the UI. But for now, let’s imagine that you are going to do all the development.

Screenshot of opening the admin ui

The Admin UI contains all the tools that application developers need to configure the application backend and that content managers need to update the application content.

In the sidebar of the Admin UI (as shown in the following illustration), you can find all the different options for setting up your application.

To get started with the restaurant website, you need a menu data model. For that, first go to Data (1), then create a new data model call Menu (2), add the necessary fields and Save and deploy (3) the model. Saving and deploying the model will create all the needed AWS resources in the backend, like an AWS AppSync API and a Amazon DynamoDB table to host the menu items. Deploying takes a few minutes.

Screenshot for data modeling

After your model is deployed, you can start working on your website. For this example I will be using React, one of the web frameworks supported by AWS Amplify, but you can do the same example with any of the supported frameworks.

First, you need to install the AWS Amplify CLI:

npm install -g @aws-amplify/cli

Then create a new React application:

npx create-react-app react-amplified
cd react-amplified

When your application is created, you can configure it with the AWS Amplify application we just created. For that, go back to the Admin UI and select Local setup instructions (1), and execute the amplify command (2) in the directory where the web application is stored in your computer.

Screenshot of pulling amplify configuration

When you execute that command, a browser window will open that asks you if you are sure that you want to log in to the AWS Amplify Admin UI. Selecting yes will grant the AWS Amplify CLI access to deploy updates to the backend directly from your local desktop. The CLI will prompt you with a few questions about your local environment, and finally will ask if you plan to modify this backend locally. Choose yes.

When that process ends, you will notice some changes in your web application directory: a couple of new directories were created (amplify and src/models) and also a new file (aws-exports.js). These files and directories hold all the configuration for your AWS Amplify application.

Now it’s time to develop your application. To access the menu data model you created in the first steps, you will use the DataStore library from AWS Amplify. DataStore allows you to connect to your deployed database and perform CRUD, sort and filter operations from your UI to manipulate backend data. In the Admin UI, you can see some examples on how to create, update, delete and query the model.

Screenshot of using the data model

When the website is ready, it’s time to add some content. The restaurant owner is the one adding the menu items. In order for them to be able to add items, they need to have permissions to access the Admin UI for this application.

To do this, you need to create a new Admin UI account for the restaurant owner with the correct permissions. Go to the AWS Amplify console for your application and then to the Admin UI management and invite users.

When adding new users to the Admin UI you can define their permission scope. If you want to grant them full access, they will be able to configure and manage the application backend environment, and if you want them just to be able to edit the content, you can give them the manage only access scope. For the restaurant owner grant manage only permissions.

Screenshot for inviting new users to the AdminUI

After sending the invite, the restaurant owner will receive an email with a link to access the Admin UI and a username and password to log in. When they log in, they can go to the Content tab (1) and start adding items in their menu (2) and they can see the items available in the table in the screen (3).

Screenshot adding new content

From this screen, the restaurant owner can add, delete and edit items in their menu whenever they want to. These changes are reflected in the website immediately after they save.

The use cases for Admin UI are endless, such as blogs, e-commerce sites, planning apps, etc. Developers can build complex and feature-rich apps by focusing on their domain-specific data model instead of spending hours deploying and stitching together cloud infrastructure. AWS Amplify gives front-end developers the fastest and easiest way to develop mobile and web apps. And all accessible to developers that are not familiar with the cloud and without the need to give AWS access to everybody in the team.

Availability
AWS Amplify Admin UI is available at launch in: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), and Europe (London).

For more information, visit the Amplify service page. Get started building a data model without an AWS account in the sandbox experience.

— Marcia

Amazon EKS Distro: The Kubernetes Distribution Used by Amazon EKS

Post Syndicated from Martin Beeby original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-eks-distro-the-kubernetes-distribution-used-by-amazon-eks/

Our customers have told us that they want to focus on building innovative solutions for their customers, and focus less on the heavy lifting of managing Kubernetes infrastructure. That is why Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) has been so popular; we remove the burden of managing Kubernetes while our customers glean the benefits.

However, not all customers choose to use Amazon EKS. For example, they may have existing infrastructure investments, data residency requirements or compliance obligations that lead them to operate Kubernetes on-premises. Customers in these situations tell us that they spend a lot of effort to track updates, figure out compatible versions of Kubernetes and the complicated matrix of underlying components, test them for compatibility, and keep pace with the Kubernetes release cadence, which can be as frequent as every three to four months. If customers are not able to maintain pace for testing and qualifying new versions, they risk breaking changes, version compatibility issues, and running unsupported versions of Kubernetes lacking critical security patches.

We have learned a lot while providing Amazon EKS at AWS and have developed a deep understanding of how to deliver Kubernetes with operational security, stability, and reliability. Today we are sharing Amazon EKS Distro, which we built using that knowledge.

EKS Distro is a distribution of the same version of Kubernetes deployed by Amazon EKS, which you can use to manually create your own Kubernetes clusters anywhere you choose. EKS Distro provides the installable builds and code of open source Kubernetes used by Amazon EKS, including the dependencies and AWS-maintained patches. Using a choice of cluster creation and management tooling, you can create EKS Distro clusters in AWS on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), in other clouds, and on your on-premises hardware.

EKS Distro includes upstream open source Kubernetes components and third-party tools including configuration database, network, and storage components necessary for cluster creation. They include Kubernetes control plane components (kube-controller-manager, etcd, and CoreDNS) and Kubernetes worker node components (kubelet, CNI plugins, CSI Sidecar images, Metrics Server and AWS-IAM-authenticator).

Building a Cluster
The EKS Distro repository has everything you need to build and create Kubernetes clusters. The repository contains the raw documentation for EKS Distro, and it has been built and published at https://distro.eks.amazonaws.com.

To create a new cluster, I follow this section of the documentation. The guide explains how I can build all of the parts and ultimately deploy a cluster to some EC2 instances on AWS using the open source tool kOps. EKS Distro works with many other tools besides kOps. You can find the details in the partner section of the documentation, and many partners have released blogs today that explain how you can deploy using their tooling.

The guide explains that before I can build my cluster, I need to get several container images. I can get them from the EKS Distro Container repository, download them as a tarball, or build them from scratch. I opt to build my containers from scratch and follow the Build Guide. An hour later, I have managed to create twenty containers and have pushed them into Amazon Elastic Container Registry.

The instructions detail several prerequisites that are required by both the build and deploy stages. I follow the guide and install all of the tools suggested.

Next, as per the guide, I locate the kops.sh script in the development folder of the EKS Distro repository. After running the script, it prompts me to enter a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN). I provide newsblog.thebeebs.net.

This script does several things, including creating an S3 bucket in my account to store artifacts required by kOps. Also, it creates a file called newsblog.thebeebs.net.yaml. I edit this file and replace the container Image URLs with ones that point to my images in Elastic Container Registry.

I continue to follow the guide, which now instructs me to run some kOps commands to create my cluster. These commands use the newsblog.thebeebs.net.yaml file, which was an output of the previous step.

CLUSTER_NAME=newsblog.thebeebs.net
kops create -f ./$CLUSTER_NAME.yaml
kops create secret --name $CLUSTER_NAME sshpublickey admin -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
kops update cluster $CLUSTER_NAME --yes
kops validate cluster --wait 10m
cat << EOF > aws-iam-authenticator.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: aws-iam-authenticator
  namespace: kube-system
  labels:
    k8s-app: aws-iam-authenticator
data:
  config.yaml: |
    clusterID: $CLUSTER_NAME
EOF

One of these commands creates a file called aws-iam-authenticator.yaml. I will apply this file to my kubernetes cluster so that it works correctly with the aws-iam-authenticator.

kubectl apply -f aws-iam-authenticator.yaml

I can now verify that my Kubernetes cluster is using the EKS Distro images by using kubectl to list all of the namespaces.

kubectl get po --all-namespaces -o json | jq -r .items[].spec.containers[].image | sort

Lastly, I delete my cluster by using kOps and issuing a delete command.

kops delete -f ./newsblog.thebeebs.net.yaml --yes

Updates
New versions of EKS Distro will be released soon after we make releases to Amazon EKS. The source code, open source tools, and settings are provided for reproducible builds so you can be assured EKS Distro matches what is deployed by Amazon EKS.

Things to Know
EKS Distro supports the same versions of Kubernetes and point releases that Amazon EKS uses. EKS Distro provides the same upstream versions of Kubernetes and dependencies that operating system vendors have tested and confirmed work with Kubernetes. This means that EKS Distro already works with common operating systems, such as CentOS, Canonical Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Suse, and more.

Pricing and Support
EKS Distro is an open source project and will be distributed for free. Please collaborate with us on GitHub to make it even better. For example, if you find any issues, please submit them or create a pull request and we will fix them on a best effort basis. Partners will receive support through the Amazon Partner Network program and customers that adopt EKS Distro through partners will receive support from those providers.

What is Coming Next?
In 2021 we will be launching EKS Anywhere, which will provide an installable software package for creating and operating Kubernetes clusters on-premises and automation tooling for cluster lifecycle support, it will enable you to centrally backup, recover, patch, and upgrade your production clusters with minimal disruption. EKS Anywhere creates clusters based on EKS Distro, and so you will have version consistency with Amazon EKS. This version and tooling consistency will reduce support costs, and eliminate the redundant effort of using multiple tools for managing your on-premises and Amazon EKS clusters.

Available Now
EKS Distro is available today for download and you can get the source and builds from GitHub. To help you get started, check out the documentation.

Happy Deploying!

— Martin

AWS re:Invent: Top Announcements for 2020

Post Syndicated from AWS News Blog Team original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-reinvent-announcements-2020/

Compute | Containers | Customer Engagement | Database | Machine Learning |

Below are the major launch and preview announcements happening at re:Invent 2020, organized by category. We’ll update this page daily over the course of the event, which takes place Nov. 30-Dec. 18. For a list of re:Invent launch posts by date, you can find the full list here.

Compute

New – Use Amazon EC2 Mac Instances to Build and Test macOS, iOS, ipadOS, tvOS, and watchOS Apps
Over the last couple of years, AWS users have told us that they want to be able to run macOS on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). We’ve asked a lot of questions to learn more about their needs, and today we introduce you to the new Mac instance!

re:Invent 2020 Pre-announcements for Tuesday, December 1
Here’s a sneak peek at some good things to come, including: AWS Outpost Servers, Amazon ECS Anywhere and Amazon EKS Anywhere.

Coming Soon – Amazon EC2 G4ad Instances Featuring AMD GPUs for Graphics Workloads
Customers with high performance graphic workloads, such as those in game streaming, animation, and video rendering, are always looking for higher performance at less cost. Today, we announce that new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances in the G4 instance family will be available soon to improve performance and reduce cost for graphics-intensive workloads.

New EC2 C6gn Instances – 100 Gbps Networking with AWS Graviton2 Processors
Today, we’re expanding our broad Arm-based Graviton2 portfolio with C6gn instances that deliver up to 100 Gbps network bandwidth, up to 38 Gbps Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) bandwidth, up to 40% higher packet processing performance, and up to 40% better price/performance versus comparable current generation x86-based network optimized instances.

EC2 Update – D3 / D3en Dense Storage Instances
We have launched several generations of EC2 instances with dense storage including the HS1 in 2012 and the D2 in 2015. Today we are launching the D3 and D3en instances. Like their predecessors, they give you access to massive amounts of low-cost on-instance HDD storage.

New – Amazon EC2 R5b Instances Provide 3x Higher EBS Performance
R5 instances are designed for memory-intensive applications such as high-performance databases, distributed web scale in-memory caches, in-memory databases, real time big data analytics, and other enterprise applications. Today, we announce the new R5b instance, which provides the best network-attached storage performance available on EC2.

New for AWS Lambda – 1ms Billing Granularity Adds Cost Savings
Since Lambda was launched in 2014, pricing has been based on the number of times code is triggered (requests) and the number of times code executes, rounded up to the nearest 100ms (duration). Starting today, we are rounding up duration to the nearest millisecond with no minimum execution time.

In the Works – 3 More AWS Local Zones in 2020, and 12 More in 2021
We launched the first AWS Local Zone in Los Angeles last December, and added a second one (also in Los Angeles) in August of 2020. With 3 more available today and 12 planned next year, we are choosing the target cities with the goal of allowing you to provide access with single-digit millisecond latency to the vast majority of users in the Continental United States.

New for AWS Lambda – Container Image Support
With Lambda, you upload your code and run it without thinking about servers. Many customers enjoy the way this works, but if you’ve invested in container tooling for your development workflows, it’s not easy to use the same approach to build applications using Lambda. To help you with that, you can now package and deploy Lambda functions as container images of up to 10 GB in size.

Containers

Amazon ECR Public: A New Public Container Registry
You have long been able to host private container images on AWS with Amazon Elastic Container Registry, and now with the release of Amazon Elastic Container Registry Public, you can host public ones too, enabling anyone (with or without an AWS account) to browse and pull your published containers.

Preview of AWS Proton – Automated Management for Container and Serverless Deployments
Maintaining hundreds – or sometimes thousands – of microservices with constantly changing infrastructure resources and configurations is a challenging task for even the most capable teams. AWS Proton enables infrastructure teams to define standard templates centrally and make them available for developers in their organization. This allows infrastructure teams to manage and update infrastructure without impacting developer productivity.

Customer Engagement

Amazon Connect – Now Smarter and More Integrated With Third-Party Tools
We launched Amazon Connect in 2017 and, since then, thousands of customers have created their own contact centers in the cloud. Amazon Connect makes it easy for non-technical customers to design interaction flows, manage agents, and track performance metrics. Today, we announce a new set of capabilities to make Amazon Connect smarter and more integrated with third-party tools.

Database

New – Amazon QuickSight Q Answers Natural-Language Questions About Business Data
Today, we are happy to announce the preview of Amazon QuickSight Q, a Natural Language Query (NLQ) feature powered by machine learning (ML). With Q, business users can now use QuickSight to ask questions about their data using everyday language and receive accurate answers in seconds.

Now in Preview – Larger and Faster io2 Block Express EBS Volumes with Higher Throughput
Earlier this year we launched io2 volumes with 100x higher durability and 10x more IOPS/GiB than the earlier io1 volumes. Today we are opening up a preview of io2 Block Express volumes that are designed to deliver even higher performance!

New – Amazon EBS gp3 Volume Lets You Provision Performance Apart From Capacity
When using general purpose SSD gp2 volumes with EBS, performance is associated with storage capacity. Today we announce the new gp3 volume that lets customers increase IOPS and throughput without having to provision additional block storage capacity, paying only for the resources they need.

Machine Learning

New- Amazon DevOps Guru Helps Identify Application Errors and Fixes
Today, we are announcing Amazon DevOps Guru, a fully managed operations service that makes it easy for developers and operators to improve application availability by automatically detecting operational issues and recommending fixes.

Amazon Lookout for Equipment Analyzes Historical Sensor Data to Help Detect Equipment Failure
Companies that operate industrial equipment are constantly working to improve operational efficiency and avoid unplanned downtime due to component failure. Amazon Lookout for Equipment is an API-based machine learning (ML) service that detects abnormal equipment behavior and helps companies monitor the health of their assets.

Amazon Lookout for Vision Simplifies Defect Detection for Manufacturing
Lookout for Vision is a new machine learning service that helps increase industrial product quality and reduce operational costs by automating visual inspection of product defects across production processes. Using Lookout for Vision, you can detect damages to manufactured parts, identify missing components or parts, and uncover underlying process-related issues in your manufacturing lines.

AWS Panorama Appliance – Bringing Computer Vision Applications to the Edge
Today we preview the AWS Panorama Appliance and its associated console. You can now develop a computer vision model using Amazon SageMaker and then deploy it to a Panorama Appliance that can then run the model on video feeds from multiple network and IP cameras.

Amazon Monitron is a Simple and Cost-Effective Service Enabling Predictive Maintenance
Monitron is an easy and cost-effective condition monitoring service that allows you to monitor the condition of equipment in your facilities, enabling the implementation of a predictive maintenance program.

Amazon Lookout for Vision – New ML Service Simplifies Defect Detection for Manufacturing

Post Syndicated from Marcia Villalba original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-lookout-for-vision-new-machine-learning-service-that-simplifies-defect-detection-for-manufacturing/

Today, I’m excited to announce Amazon Lookout for Vision, a new machine learning (ML) service that helps customers in industrial environments to detect visual defects on production units and equipment in an easy and cost-effective way.

Can you spot the circuit board with the defect in these images?

Image of 3 circuit boards - one is faulty

Maybe you can if you are familiar with circuit boards, but I have to say that it took me a while to discover the error. Humans, when properly trained and are well rested, are great at finding anomalies in a set of objects. However, when they are tired or not properly trained – like me in this example – they can be slow, prone to errors and inconsistent.

That’s why many companies use machine vision technologies to detect anomalies. However, these technologies need to be calibrated with controlled lighting and camera viewpoints. In addition, you need to specify hard-coded rules that define what is a defect and what is not, making the technologies very specialized and complex to build.

Lookout for Vision is a new machine learning service that helps increase industrial product quality and reduce operational costs by automating visual inspection of product defects across production processes. Lookout for Vision uses deep learning models to replace hard-coded rules and handles the differences in camera angle, lighting and other challenges that arise from the operational environment. With Lookout for Vision, you can reduce the need for carefully controlled environments.

Using Lookout for Vision, you can detect damages to manufactured parts, identify missing components or parts, and uncover underlying process-related issues in your manufacturing lines.

How to Get Started With Lookout for Vision
The first thing I want to mention is that to use Lookout for Vision, you don’t need to be a machine learning expert. Lookout for Vision is a fully managed service and comes with anomaly detection models that can be optimized for your use case and your data.

There are several steps for using Lookout for Vision. The first is preparing the dataset, which includes creating a dataset of images and adding labels to the images. Then, Lookout for Vision uses this dataset to automatically train the ML model that learns to detect anomalies in your product. The final part is using the model in production. You can keep evaluating the performance of your trained model and improve it at any time using tools that Lookout for Vision provides.

Service console tutorial for getting started

Preparing the Data
To get started with the model, you first need a set of images of your product. For better results, include images with normal (no defects) and anomalous content (includes defects). To get started with training, you will need at least 20 normal images and 10 anomalous images.

There are many ways of importing images into Lookout for Vision from the AWS Management Console: You can provide manifests for annotated images using the Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth service, provide images from an S3 bucket or upload directly from your computer.

Different ways to import your images.

After you upload the images, you need to add labels to classify the images in your dataset as normal or anomalous. Labeling is a very important step, as this is the key information that Lookout for Vision uses to train the model for your use case.

For this demo, I import the images from an S3 bucket. If you’ve organized the images in your S3 bucket by folder name (/anomaly/01.jpeg), Lookout for Vision will automatically import the folder structure into corresponding labels.

Training the Model
When our dataset is ready, we need to train our model with it. The training button is enabled once you have the minimum number of labeled images: 20 normal and 10 anomalous.

Depending on the size of the dataset, training may take a while to complete: for me, it took around an hour to train the model with 100 images. Note that you will begin incurring costs when Lookout for Vision starts to actually train the model. After training is complete, your model is ready to detect anomalies in new images.

Screenshot of a model in training.

Evaluating the Model
There are a couple of ways to evaluate whether your model is ready to be deployed to production. The first is to review the performance metrics of the model and the second is to run some production–like tests that will help you to verify if the model is ready to be deployed.

There are three main performance metrics: precision, recall and the F1 score. Precision measures the percentage of times the model prediction is correct and recall measures the percentage of true defects the model identified. F1 score is used to determine the model performance metric.

Screenshot of model performance metrics

If you want to run some production-like tests to verify if your model is ready, use the run trial detection feature. This will enable you to run your Lookout for Vision model and predict anomalies on new images. You can further improve the model by manually verifying the results and adding new training images.

Create a new job to predict anomalies.

I used the three images that appear at the beginning of this post for my trial detection. The trial detection job ran for 15-20 minutes, and after that Lookout for Vision used the trained model to classify the images into “Normal” and “Anomaly.” When Lookout for Vision finalizes the trial detection job, you can verify the results as correct or incorrect, and add this images to the dataset.

Screenshot verifying the results of the trial

Using the Model in Production
To use Lookout for Vision, you need to integrate the AWS SDKs or CLI in the systems that are processing the images of the products in the manufacturing line, and internet connectivity is required for this to work. The first thing you need to do is to start the model. When using Lookout for Vision, you are billed for the time your model is running and making inferences. For example, if you start your model at 8 a.m. and stop it at 5 p.m., you will be billed for 9 hours.

# Example CLI
aws lookoutvision start-model 
--project-name circuitBoard 
--model-version 1
--additional-output-config "Bucket=<OUTPUT_BUCKET>,Prefix=<PREFIX_KEY>" 
--min-anomaly-detection-units 10 

# Example response
{ "status" : "STARTING_HOSTING" }

When your model is ready, you can call the detect-anomalies API from Lookout for Vision.

# Example CLI
aws lookoutvision detect-anomalies 
--project-name circuitBoard 
--model-version 1 

And this API will return a JSON response that shows if the image is an anomaly or not, along with the confidence level of that prediction.

{
    "DetectAnomalyResult": {
        "Source": {
            "Type": "direct"
        },
        "IsAnomalous": true,
        "Confidence": 0.97
    }
}

When you are done with detecting anomalies for the day, use the stop-model API. In the Lookout for Vision service console you can find code snippets on how to use these APIs.

When you are using Lookout for Vision in production, you’ll find a dashboard that helps you to sort and track the production lines by most defective line, line with the most recent defects, and the line with the highest anomaly ratio.

Available Today
Lookout for Vision is available in all AWS Regions.

To get started with Amazon Lookout for Vision, visit the service page today.

— Marcia

Announcing Cloud Audit Academy AWS-specific for audit and compliance teams

Post Syndicated from Chad Woolf original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/announcing-cloud-audit-academy-aws-specific-for-audit-and-compliance-teams/

Today, I’m pleased to announce the launch of Cloud Audit Academy AWS-specific (CAA AWS-specific). This is a new, accelerated training program for auditing AWS Cloud implementations, and is designed for auditors, regulators, or anyone working within a control framework.

Over the past few years, auditing security in the cloud has become one of the fastest growing questions among Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers, across multiple industries and all around the world. Here are the two pain points that I hear about most often:

  • Engineering teams want to move regulatory frameworks compliant workloads to AWS to take advantage of its innovation capabilities, but security and risk teams are uncertain how AWS can help them meet their compliance requirements through audits.
  • Compliance teams want to effectively audit the cloud environments and take advantage of the available security control options that are built into the cloud, but the legacy audit processes and control frameworks are built for an on-premises environment. The differences require some reconciliation and improvement work to be done on compliance programs, audit processes, and auditor training.

To help address these issues for not only AWS customers but for any auditor or compliance team facing cloud migration, we announced Cloud Audit Academy Cloud Agnostic (CAA Cloud Agnostic) at re:Inforce 2019. This foundational, first-of-its-kind, course provides baseline knowledge on auditing in the cloud and in understanding the differences in control operation, design, and auditing. It is cloud agnostic and can benefit security and compliance professionals in any industry—including independent third-party auditors. Since its launch in June 2019, 1,400 students have followed this cloud audit learning path, with 91 percent of participants saying that they would recommend the workshop to others.

So today we’re releasing the next phase of that education program, Cloud Audit Academy AWS-specific. Offered virtually or in-person, CAA AWS-specific is an instructor-led workshop on addressing risks and auditing security in the AWS Cloud, with a focus on the security and audit tools provided by AWS. All instructors have professional audit industry experience, current audit credentials, and maintain AWS Solutions Architect credentials.

Here are four things to know about CAA AWS-specific and what it has to offer audit and compliance teams:

  1. Content was created with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)
    PricewaterhouseCoopers worked with us to develop the curriculum content, bringing their expertise in independent risk and control auditing.
     
    “With so many of our customers already in the cloud—or ready to be—we’ve seen a huge increase in the need to meet regulatory and compliance requirements. We’re excited to have combined our risk and controls experience with the power of AWS to create a curriculum in which customers can not only [leverage AWS to help them] meet their compliance needs, but unlock the total value of their cloud investment.” – Paige Hayes, Global Account Leader at PwC

  2. Attendees earn continuing professional education credits
    Based on feedback from CAA Cloud Agnostic, we now offer continuing professional education (CPE) credits to attendees. Completion of CAA AWS-specific will allow attendees to earn 28 CPE credits towards any of the International Information System Security Certification Consortium, or (ISC)², certifications, and 18 CPE credits towards any Global Information Assurance Certification (GIAC).

  3. Training helps boost confidence when auditing the AWS cloud
    Our customers have proven repeatedly that running sensitive workloads in AWS can be more secure than in on-premises environments. However, a lack of knowledge and updated processes for implementing, monitoring, and proving compliance in the cloud has caused some difficulty. Through CAA AWS-specific, you will get critical training to become more comfortable and confident knowing how to audit the AWS environment with precision.

    “Our FSI customer conversations are often focused on security and compliance controls. Leveraging the Cloud Audit Academy enables our team to educate the internal and external auditors of our customers. CAA provides them the necessary tools and knowledge to evaluate and gain comfort with their AWS control environment firsthand. The varying depth and levels focus on everything from basic cloud auditing to diving deeper into the domains which align with our governance and control domains. We reference key AWS services that customers can utilize to create an effective control environment that [helps to meet their] regulatory and audit expectations.” – Jeff (Axe) Axelrad, Compliance Manager, AWS Financial Services

  4. Training enables the governance, risk, and compliance professional
    In four days of CAA AWS-specific, you’ll become more comfortable with topics like control domains, network management, vulnerability management, logging and monitoring, incident response, and general knowledge about compliance controls in the cloud.

    “In addition to [using AWS to help support and maintain their compliance], our customers need to be able to clearly communicate with their external auditors and regulators HOW compliance is achieved. CAA doesn’t teach auditors how to audit, but rather accelerates the learning necessary to understand specifically how the control landscape changes.” – Jesse Skibbe, Sr. Practice Manager, AWS Professional Services

CAA Cloud Agnostic provides some foundational concepts and is a prerequisite to CAA AWS-specific. It is available for free online at our AWS Training and Certification learning library, or you can contact your account manager to have a one-day instructor-led training session in person.

If it sounds like Cloud Audit Academy training would benefit you and your team, contact our AWS Security Assurance Services team or contact your AWS account manager. For more information, check out the newly updated Security Audit Learning Path.

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

Want more AWS Security how-to content, news, and feature announcements? Follow us on Twitter.

Author

Chad Woolf

Chad joined Amazon in 2010 and built the AWS compliance functions from the ground up, including audit and certifications, privacy, contract compliance, control automation engineering and security process monitoring. Chad’s work also includes enabling public sector and regulated industry adoption of the AWS Cloud, compliance with complex privacy regulations such as GDPR and operating a trade and product compliance team in conjunction with global region expansion. Prior to joining AWS, Chad spent 12 years with Ernst & Young as a Senior Manager working directly with Fortune 100 companies consulting on IT process, security, risk, and vendor management advisory work, as well as designing and deploying global security and assurance software solutions. Chad holds a Masters of Information Systems Management and a Bachelors of Accounting from Brigham Young University, Utah. Follow Chad on Twitter

New – Amazon Lookout for Equipment Analyzes Sensor Data to Help Detect Equipment Failure

Post Syndicated from Harunobu Kameda original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-lookout-for-equipment-analyzes-sensor-data-to-help-detect-equipment-failure/

Companies that operate industrial equipment are constantly working to improve operational efficiency and avoid unplanned downtime due to component failure. They invest heavily and repeatedly in physical sensors (tags), data connectivity, data storage, and building dashboards over the years to monitor the condition of their equipment and get real-time alerts. The primary data analysis methods are single-variable threshold and physics-based modeling approaches, and while these methods are effective in detecting specific failure types and operating conditions, they can often miss important information detected by deriving multivariate relationships for each piece of equipment.

With machine learning, more powerful technologies have become available that can provide data-driven models that learn from an equipment’s historical data. However, implementing such machine learning solutions is time-consuming and expensive owing to capital investment and training of engineers.

Today, we are happy to announce Amazon Lookout for Equipment, an API-based machine learning (ML) service that detects abnormal equipment behavior. With Lookout for Equipment, customers can bring in historical time series data and past maintenance events generated from industrial equipment that can have up to 300 data tags from components such as sensors and actuators per model. Lookout for Equipment automatically tests the possible combinations and builds an optimal machine learning model to learn the normal behavior of the equipment. Engineers don’t need machine learning expertise and can easily deploy models for real-time processing in the cloud.

Customers can then easily perform ML inference to detect abnormal behavior of the equipment. The results can be integrated into existing monitoring software or AWS IoT SiteWise Monitor to visualize the real-time output or to receive alerts if an asset tends toward anomalous conditions.

How Lookout for Equipment Works
Lookout for Equipment reads directly from Amazon S3 buckets. Customers can publish their industrial data in S3 and leverage Lookout for Equipment for model development. A user determines the value or time period to be used for training and assigns an appropriate label. Given this information, Lookout for Equipment launches a task to learn and creates the best ML model for each customer.

Because Lookout for Equipment is an automated machine learning tool, it gets smarter over time as users use Lookout for Equipment to retrain their models with new data. This is useful for model re-creation when new invisible failures occur, or when the model drifts over time. Once the model is complete and can be inferred, Lookout for Equipment provides real-time analysis.

With the equipment data being published to S3, the user can scheduled inference that ranges from 5 minutes to one hour. When the user data arrives in S3, Lookout for Equipment fetches the new data on the desired schedule, performs data inference, and stores the results in another S3 bucket.

Set up Lookout for Equipment with these simply steps:

  1. Upload data to S3 buckets
  2. Create datasets
  3. Ingest data
  4. Create a model
  5. Schedule inference (if you need real-time analysis)

1. Upload data
You need to upload tag data from equipment to any S3 bucket.

2. Create Datasets

Select Create dataset, and set Dataset name, and set Data Schema. Data schema is like a data design document that defines the data to be fed in later. Then select Create.

creating datasets console

3. Ingest data
After a dataset is created, the next step is to ingest data. If you are familiar with Amazon Personalize or Amazon Forecast, doesn’t this screen feel familiar? Yes, Lookout for Equipment is as easy to use as those are.

Select Ingest data.

Ingesting data consoleSpecify the S3 bucket location where you uploaded your data, and an IAM role. The IAM role has to have a trust relationship to “lookoutequipment.amazonaws.com” You can use the following policy file for the test.

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": {
        "Service": "lookoutequipment.amazonaws.com"
      },
      "Action": "sts:AssumeRole"
    }
  ]
}

The data format in the S3 bucket has to match the Data Schema you set up in step 2. Please check our technical documents for more detail. Ingesting data takes a few minutes to tens of minutes depending on your data volume.

4. Create a model
After data ingest is completed, you can train your own ML model now. Select Create new model. Fields show us a list of fields in the ingested data. By default, no field is selected. You can select fields you want Lookout for Equipment to learn. Lookout for Equipment automatically finds and trains correlations from multiple specified fields and creates a model.

Image illustrates setting up fields.

If you are sure that your data has some unusual data included, you can optionally set the windows to exclude that data.

setting up maintenance windowOptionally, you can divide ingested data for training and then for evaluation. The data specified during the evaluation period is checked compared to the trained model.

setting up evaluation window

Once you select Create, Lookout for Equipment starts to train your model. This process takes minutes to hours depending on your data volume. After training is finished, you can evaluate your model with the evaluation period data.

model performance console

5. Schedule Inference
Now it is time to analyze your real time data. Select Schedule Inference, and set up your S3 buckets for input.

setting up input S3 bucket

You can also set Data upload frequency, which is actually the same as inferencing frequency, and Offset delay time. Then, you need to set up Output data as Lookout for Equipment outputs the result of inference.

setting up inferenced output S3 bucket

Amazon Lookout for Equipment is In Preview Today
Amazon Lookout for Equipment is in preview today at US East (N. Virginia), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Europe (Ireland) and you can see the documentation here.

– Kame

Amazon Connect – Now Smarter and More Integrated With Third-Party Tools

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-connect-smarter-and-more-integrated/

We launched Amazon Connect in 2017 and, since then, thousands of customers have created their own contact centers in the cloud. Amazon Connect makes it easy for non-technical customers to design interaction flows, manage agents, and track performance metrics.

For example, when I book a Best Western hotel room in Europe by phone, the call is managed by Amazon Connect. In the UK, the Post Office went from ideation to production rollout in just three weeks. In France, WebHelp, a global leader in Business Process Outsourcing, activated thousands of workstations and remote agents in just 72 hours.

Since I last blogged about Amazon Connect, the team has been continuously listening for your feedback and, today, I am happy to announce a new set of capabilities to make Amazon Connect smarter and more integrated with third-party tools.

We are using Machine Learning (ML) to make Amazon Connect smarter at analyzing conversations in real time, finding relevant information needed by contact center agents, and authenticating customers by the sound of their voice. The second set of capabilities makes Amazon Connect easier to integrate with third party tools or services to present unified customer profile information to contact center agents, and to make it easier to manage their tasks.

Let’s go into the details, one by one.

Contact Lens Real Time
Contact Lens for Amazon Connect is a set of machine learning (ML) capabilities allowing contact center supervisors to better understand the sentiment, trends, and compliance of customer conversations. It was first announced during re:Invent 2019 and available since July 2020. It allows to effectively train agents, replicate successful interactions, and to identify crucial company and product feedback.

Starting today, you can get real-time insights into customer experience during the live calls, such as a customer expressing dissatisfaction. Customer experience analytics and alerts for live calls are delivered in Amazon Connect’s real-time metrics dashboard. It makes it easy for supervisors to identify when to listen-in on a critical call, and to provide guidance to the agent via chat, or have the agent transfer the call to them for assistance.

You, as the contact center manager, can define rules using specific terms such as “not happy,” “poor quality product,” and “cancel my subscription.” Contact Lens uses natural language processing (NLP) to perform intelligent matching to automatically detect variations of the spoken words even when the example phrases are limited.

Create Rules for real time analytics

Contact Lens analyzes in-progress calls in real time to detect when the rule criteria for a customer experience issue is met, and immediately creates an alert next to the live call in the Amazon Connect dashboard to notify supervisors of the situation.

Real Time alert based on rules

With this launch, we are adding 13 language variants to post-call analytics, in addition to the 5 already supported :English (United States), English (Great Britain), English (Australia), English (India), and Spanish (United States).

The new language variants for post-call analytics are: English (Ireland), English (Scotland), English (Wales), Spanish (Spain), French (Canada), French (France), Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil), German (Germany), German (Switzerland), Italian (Italy), Arabic (Gulf), and Hindi (India).

Contact Lens for Amazon Connect real-time is available in 4 language variants: English (United States), English (Great Britain), English (Australia), and Spanish (United States). More language variants will be added at later stage.

For more details visit this launch page.

Amazon Connect Wisdom (Preview)
Wisdom provides built-in agent assistance capabilities in Amazon Connect, including machine learning (ML) powered search and real-time recommendations, to quickly enable agents with relevant information for resolving customer issues.

As an agent, I can type questions or phrases in the Wisdom search box, without guessing what keyword I should use. Wisdom understands what information I am searching for. It surfaces results in the agent’s preferred Amazon Connect application, the web-based one we do provide, or the ones you built.

Amazon Connect Wisdom search results

Wisdom comes with pre-built connectors to third-party knowledge repositories to provide most relevant results to agents. Wisdom includes connectors for Salesforce and ServiceNow during the preview, with more to come at launch.

Wisdom may use Contact Lens Real Time analytics to analyse the conversation in real-time. It detects the customer issue, finds related content in the connected repositories, and provides proactive recommendations to help the agent resolve it. For example, Wisdom can detect that a customer is talking about a problem with the handbag they bought last week, recommend an article that describes similar products defect, and provide instructions with a link to the order management application needed to initiate an exchange.

Wisdom is available in preview, you can signup today or visit the launch page.

Amazon Connect Voice ID (Preview)
Amazon Connect Voice ID provides real-time caller authentication which makes voice interactions in contact centers more secure and efficient.

To effectively recognise me as “Sébastien”, Voice ID must learn how I am talking. This is the enrolment phase. Then it compares the sound of my voice with the one enrolled earlier. This is the verification phase.

To meet with personal data protection laws, contact center agents capture my consent to use Voice ID.

During the enrolment phase, Voice ID listens to the call until it has captured 30 seconds of my voice. Then it creates my voiceprint, which uniquely authenticates me. A voiceprint is a mathematical representation that captures unique aspects of an individual’s voice such as speech rhythm, pitch, intonation, and loudness. I do not need to say or repeat any specific phrases to let Voice ID create my voiceprint. Voice ID provides an API that can be used to opt-out a customer.

When I call back in, Voice ID just needs 10 seconds of my voice to authenticate me. My voice can be captured as part of a typical interaction with the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) happening at the start of the call, or when I first start to talk with the agent. For example when I am answering questions, such as “what’s your first and last name?” and “what are you calling about?”, Voice ID uses this audio to generate my voiceprint again. It compares it with the one enrolled earlier. Voice ID then generates an authentication score depending on the confidence of the match. Contact center managers can use this score to create policies in Amazon Connect to let agents see a real-time result (“authenticated” or “not authenticated”) in their web-based application. Agents can then decide to proceed with the call or ask for additional authentication credentials.

Amazon Connect Voice ID is available in preview. You can signup today or visit this launch page.

Amazon Connect Customer Profiles
Customer Profiles is a unified profile for Amazon Connect that brings together customer information from disparate sources without having to build integrations or wrangle data.

Providing agents (or automatic IVR systems) with accurate and unified customer profile information at the right moment helps them to deliver better service to customers, and to resolve calls faster. Using Customer Profiles, agents must not navigate out of Amazon Connect, or switch between different applications to get the customer insights they need.

With just a few clicks, System Administrators can integrate customer profile data from applications like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk, and Marketo to build your own homegrown integration. Setting up connectors for Customer Profiles requires no programming or data integration expertise.

Once enabled, Customer Profiles automatically detects customer records from the applications. It matches and deduplicates them. This results in accurate and up-to-date profiles displayed to agents within their Connect web-based experience.

Amazon Connect Customer Profile

Learn more about Amazon Connect Customer Profile by visiting the launch page.

Amazon Connect Tasks
Amazon Connect Tasks makes it easy to automate, track, and manage contact center agent tasks. It provides a single place for contact center managers to prioritize, assign, and track customer service tasks across the disparate applications used by agents, so that they are focused on the highest priority work of any type.

Tasks can be sourced from third-party applications, such as a CRM solution, or to update a business-specific system. For example, you can programmatically create tasks for agents to follow-up on a customer case in a third party application like Salesforce, or complete an action item in a business-specific application, such as processing a claim in an insurance system. You can also automate tasks that dont require agent interaction, to ensure your agents spend more time focused on customers.

Using Amazon Connect tasks, agents no longer need to switch between applications to know what work should be completed, and with what priority. Agents can see all their assigned tasks right from the Amazon Connect contact control panel, the same web-based application they use to interact with customers over calls and chat. When a task is assigned, the agent receives a notification with the description of the task, and when required, links to any external applications needed to complete the action. Agents can also create tasks so that follow-up work is not forgotten, for example calling a customer back to provide a status update.

Amazon Connect Accept Tasks Amazon Connect View Task Create a task uisng Amazon Connect Tasks
Incoming Tasks Task Details Create a new Task

Amazon Connect Tasks provides pre-built connectors fo Salesforce and Zendesk. With just a few clicks, you can easily set up rules to automatically create tasks based on pre-defined conditions, as sown on the screenshot hereunder. It also provides an API to create tasks from any other application.

Amazon Connect Task Rules

Learn more about how to configure and to get started with Tasks by visiting the launch page.

Available Today
Three of these new capabilities are available today: Contact Lens Real Time, Customer Profiles, and Tasks. You must register to the preview program to test Wisdom and Voice ID.

Customer Profile and Tasks are available in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect is available : US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (London). Contact Lens Real Time is available in US West (Oregon), US East (N. Virginia), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) at the moment. Wisdom is available in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) during the preview, while Voice ID is available only in US West (Oregon) during the preview.

With Amazon Connect, you only pay for what you use. There are no required up-front payments, long-term commitments, or minimum monthly fees. The price metrics for these new capabilities are detailed on the Amazon Connect pricing page.

Should you need help adding Amazon Connect any of these capabilities to contact flows, please reach out to one of the dozens of Amazon Connect partners available worldwide.

— seb