Tag Archives: Containers

Introducing private registry authentication support for AWS Fargate

Post Syndicated from tiffany jernigan (@tiffanyfayj) original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/introducing-private-registry-authentication-support-for-aws-fargate/

Private registry authentication support for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is now available with the AWS Fargate launch type! Now, in addition to Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), you can use any private registry or repository of your choice for both EC2 and Fargate launch types.

For ECS to pull from a private repository, it needs a secret in AWS Secrets Manager with your registry credentials, an ECS task execution IAM role in AWS Identity Access Management (IAM) with a policy granting access to the secret, and a task with the secret and task execution IAM role ARNs in the task definition.

Diagram of ECS Private Registry Authentication Architecture

Here’s how to use ECS with a private repository on Docker Hub via the AWS Management Console.

Registry

If you don’t already have a private repository (or account), you can create a free repo now. To follow along, run the following commands in a terminal to pull an image, get the image ID, and push it to your new repository:

docker pull tiffanyfay/space
docker images tiffanyfay/space --format {{.ID}}
docker tag <image-id> <your-username/repository-name>:latest
docker login
docker push <your-username/repository-name>

Secrets Manager

In the Secrets Manager console, store a new secret with your Docker Hub credentials, which is used to access your private repository.

By default, Secrets Manager creates an encryption key, DefaultEncryptionKey, on your behalf. You can instead use an existing key or add a new one with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), if you would prefer.

Choose Other type of secrets and add secret keys and values for username and password.

Next, create a name, such as dockerhub, and description for your secret.

Because the keys are corresponding to your Docker Hub credentials, leave rotation disabled.

On the next page, you can review your settings and store your secret. Open your new secret to see the details. Write down the Secret ARN value and keep it handy, as it is used in the next step and later, in your task definition.

IAM

Now that you have a secret, you need to provide Fargate permissions to read it. This is done via a task execution IAM role.

In the IAM console, choose Policies, Create policy. Provide Secrets Manager with read access for secretsmanager:GetSecretValue, with your secret’s ARN as the resource.

Name your policy dockerhubsecret.

If you chose to use your own encryption key, you also need to create a policy with kms:Decrypt permissions for KMS.

Next, choose Role to create an IAM role, which is used as your task execution role. Choose AWS service, Elastic Container Service, and Elastic Container Service Task.

Search for your dockerhubsecret policy and attach it to the role.

Lastly, give the role a name, such as ecsExecutionRoleDockerHub, and create it. Copy the role ARN value. Depending on how you create your task definition, you may need it.

ECS

While the mechanism to authenticate private registries is supported on both EC2 and Fargate launch types, for this example we will be launching a task on Fargate.

Before you can create a task, you need an ECS cluster, VPC, and subnets. If you don’t already have them, in the ECS console, choose Clusters, Get Started. Keep track of the cluster name, VPC ID, and subnet IDs, as you use them soon.

It’s time to create your task definition, which is used to create your task (grouping of up to ten containers that run on the same host). This is where you need your Secrets Manager ARN and IAM role name.

Choose Task Definitions, Create new Task Definition, and select the Fargate launch type. You can then configure your task definition via the wizard or scroll down, choose Configure via JSON and paste the following task definition after replacing fields with angle brackets. This task definition also works with the EC2 launch type.

{
    "family": "space-td",
    "containerDefinitions": [
        {
            "name": "space",
            "image": "<your-username/repository-name>",
            "portMappings": [
                {
                    "protocol": "tcp",
                    "containerPort": 80
                }
            ],
            "cpu": 0,
            "repositoryCredentials": {
                "credentialsParameter": "<secret-ARN>"
            }
        }
    ],
    "memory": "512",
    "cpu": "256",
    "requiresCompatibilities": [
        "FARGATE"
    ],
    "networkMode": "awsvpc",
    "executionRoleArn": "<execution-role-ARN>"
}

If you use the wizard, give your task a name, such as space-td, and specify your task execution IAM role (ecsTaskExecutionRoleDockerHub), a task size of 0.5 GB of memory, and 0.25 vCPU.

Next, choose Container Definitions, Add container. Give the container a name, specify your image <your-username/repository-name>, check the box for private registry authentication, and add your secrets manager ARN and a container port 80. Choose Add.

After you create your task definition, choose Actions, Run Task, and specify the Fargate launch type, your cluster, cluster VPC, subnets, a security group with inbound permissions for your container ports (the default one provides access to port 80). Enable auto-assigning a public IP address.

Open the task from its ID to see the details:

When the Last status field is RUNNING, under Network, copy the public IP address and paste it in a browser.

If you used pushed tiffanyfay/space to your repository, you should see the following:

I hope this post has helped you. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out!

-tiffany

Special thanks to Yuling Zhou, Deepak Dayama, Derek Petersen, Varun Iyer, Adnan Khan and several others for their insights in this blog.

tiffany jernigan

tiffany jernigan

@tiffanyfayj
Tiffany is a developer advocate at Amazon for containers on AWS. Previously she worked at Docker and Intel in software engineering and as a hardware engineer after graduating from Georgia Tech in Electrical Engineering. In the majority of her free time she dabbles in photography and spends time with family and friends. You can find her on twitter/ig as tiffanyfayj.

Hosting ASP.NET Core applications in Amazon ECS using AWS Fargate

Post Syndicated from Sundar Narasiman original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/hosting-asp-net-core-applications-in-amazon-ecs-using-aws-fargate/

There is an increasing amount of customer interest in hosting microservices-based applications using Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), largely due to the benefits offered by AWS Fargate.

AWS Fargate is a compute engine for containers that allows you to run containers without needing to provision, manage, or scale any Amazon EC2 compute infrastructure. Fargate works with Amazon ECS and can run microservices developed in many programming languages or application frameworks. This includes Java, .NET Core, Python, Node.js, Go, or Ruby on Rails. Nowadays, enterprises that are building microservices applications using .NET are using .NET core because of the cross-platform support (the ability to run in Linux).

In this post, I cover how to host a cross-platform ASP.NET core application using AWS Fargate.

Reference architecture

A good reference architecture for AWS Fargate application deployment should cover the VPC, Subnets, Load Balancer, Internet Gateway, Elastic Network Interface (ENI), AWS Fargate Task, Network ACLs, and Security Groups. The architectural choices for VPC Networking, Load Balancing, and Container Networking are also important.

There are a couple of networking approaches for deploying containers in Amazon ECS:

  • Deploy containers in the public VPC Subnet with direct Internet access
  • Deploy containers in the private VPC Subnet without direct Internet access

Because the ASP.NET Core application is going to serve traffic from the Internet, we will deploy containers in the Public VPC Subnet with direct Internet access.

When it comes to sending traffic to containers through the Load Balancer, the following options are available:

  • A public Load Balancer that accepts traffic from the Internet and route it to container through the AWS Fargate Task’s Elastic Network Interface (ENI).
  • A private, Internal Load Balancer that only accepts traffic from other containers in the cluster

Because the ASP.NET Core application container lives in the web tier, go with a public Load Balancer. The public Load Balancer accepts traffic from the Internet and routes it to the container through the AWS Fargate Task’s Elastic Network Interface (ENI).

Based on these considerations, the reference architecture for deploying to AWS Fargate should look like this diagram:

This solution deploys containers in a public Subnet (inside a VPC). The AWS Fargate Task and the two containers are hosted with direct access to the internet. They are also accessible to clients, using the public Load Balancer.

Walkthrough

To implement this architecture, we will do the following:

  1. Containerize the ASP.NET core application.
  2. Configure the reverse-proxy server.
  3. Containerize the NGINX reverse-proxy server.
  4. Create the Docker Compose file.
  5. Push container images to Amazon ECR.
  6. Create the ECS cluster.
  7. Create an Application Load Balancer.
  8. Create an AWS Fargate Task definition.
  9. Create the Amazon ECS service.

Code examples

The code examples, Dockerfile definition, Docker Compose file, and ECS task definition for this solution are available in the amazon-ecs-fargate-aspnetcore GitHub repository.

Pre-requisites

The development environment needs to have the following pre-requisites :-

  • Mac OS latest version (or) Windows 10 with latest updates (or) Ubuntu 16.0.4 or higher
  • .NET core 2.0 or higher
  • Docker latest version
  • aws cli
  • aws-ecs cli

Containerize the ASP.NET Core application

The first step in this journey is to containerize the ASP.NET Core application.

If you are using Visual Studio 2017 or later with the latest updates in Windows, you can add container support to the solution. Open the context (right-click) menu for the existing project and add Docker support.

If you are developing in Linux or Mac OS, you must explicitly add a Dockerfile.

The Dockerfile definition should look like the following, irrespective of the operating system used for development.

FROM microsoft/aspnetcore:2.0
WORKDIR /mymvcweb
COPY bin/Release/netcoreapp2.0/publish . 
ENV ASPNETCORE_URLS http://+:5000
EXPOSE 5000
ENTRYPOINT ["dotnet", "mymvcweb.dll"]

This Dockerfile definition creates an application container based on the microsoft/aspnetcore:2.0 base image. It publishes the contents of the bin/Release folder to a specified work directory, starts the default Kestrel web server and listens on port 5000 to serve web traffic.

By default, ASP.NET core uses Kestrel as the web server. Kestrel is a lightweight HTTP server and is great for serving dynamic content from ASP.NET core. However, for capabilities such as serving static content, caching requests, compressing requests, and terminating SSL from the HTTP server, a dedicated reverse-proxy server like NGINX is required.

Configure the reverse-proxy server

NGINX can act as both the HTTP and reverse-proxy server. NGINX is highly adopted because of its asynchronous, event-driven architecture that allows it to serve thousands of concurrent requests with a low-memory footprint.

In this solution, deploy a NGINX (reverse-proxy server) container in front of the application (ASP.NET core) container, defined in the AWS Fargate Task.

The reverse-proxy configuration file nginx.conf should be defined as follows:

worker_processes 4;
 
events { worker_connections 1024; }
 
http {
    sendfile on;
 
    upstream app_servers {
        server 127.0.0.1:5000;
    }
 
    server {
        listen 80;
 
        location / {
            proxy_pass         http://app_servers;
            proxy_redirect     off;
            proxy_set_header   Host $host;
            proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
            proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-Host $server_name;
        }
    }
}

The NGINX container is set to listen on port 80 and it is configured to forward the request to the application container listening on port 5000. The attribute upstream app_server in the nginx.conf file must be set with a value of mymvcweb:5000 in the local development environment.

Containerize the NGINX reverse-proxy server

Create a Dockerfile definition like the following to containerize the NGINX reverse-proxy server. It should look like the following:

FROM nginx
COPY nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

Create the Docker Compose file

Next, use docker-compose to define these two containers as a microservices in the local development environment. The Docker Compose file should look like the following:

version: '2'
services:
  mymvcweb:
    build:
      context: ./mymvcweb
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
    expose:
      - "5000"
  reverseproxy:
    build:
      context: ./reverseproxy
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
    ports:
      - "80:80"
    links :
      - mymvcweb

These two containers can be built and tested by issuing the following docker-compose commands:

docker-compose build
docker-compose up

Open http://localhost:80 in the browser and it should render the default view of ‘index. cshtml’. Whenever there is a change to the application code or container definition, the docker-compose cache should be cleaned to affect the latest changes. To do this, run the following docker-compose commands:

docker-compose stop
docker-compose rm
docker-compose rmi ‘containerimageid’

Push container images to Amazon ECR

Next, push the container images from the local environment to Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) so that the container images are available in Amazon ECR before the creation of AWS Fargate cluster.

Before you deploy this application to ECS, the upstream app_server attribute in the nginx.conf file must be set with the value of 127.0.0.1:5000. This enables the communication with the upstream application container listening on port 5000.

The first step to push the container images to ECR is to fetch the docker login command with the required security tokens. Run the following command:

aws ecr get-login --no-include-email --region us-east-1

It should return you a Docker login command with a security token. Copy the command and tokens and run it.

The second step is to tag the local container image with the remote ECR repository. Run the following command:

docker tag aspnetcorefargate_mymvcweb:latest <yourawsaccountnumber>.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mymvcweb:latest

The third step is to push the tagged image to the remote ECR registry. Run the following command:

docker push <yourawsaccountnumber>.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mywebmvc:latest

The above steps are repeated for the NGINX container as well. Now you have the container images available in ECR.

Create the Amazon ECS cluster

The Amazon ECS cluster is a logical grouping for AWS Fargate and Amazon ECS tasks. The cluster remains an administrative boundary for running every application.

In the AWS Management Console, Navigate to Create Cluster and select Networking only.
Since we’re going to create and host the Amazon ECS Service with AWS Fargate as the launch type, the notion of the Amazon ECS Cluster becomes a logical boundary. We need not create ECS instances while creating Amazon ECS Cluster, when the launch type is Fargate. Hence, we can create the Fargate cluster with required networking constructs such as VPC and Subnets.

Name the cluster and select Creation of new VPC for this cluster.

Leave the rest of the fields as their default values. You now have a VPC with two public subnets.

Create an Application Load Balancer

Next, create an Application Load Balancer, as defined in the reference architecture. The Application Load Balancer is required to load balance across multiple AWS Fargate tasks.

In the EC2 console, navigate to Create Load Balancer. Name your Load Balancer as aspnetcorefargatealb.

For Scheme, select internet-facing. For IP address type, choose ipv4. The Load Balancer listens on port 80 (HTTP). The Load Balancer’s Security Group should also allow traffic on port 80 (HTTP) from the internet.

While configuring the routing for the Load Balancer, for Target type, choose ip. For Protocol, choose HTTP. For Path, enter / (forward slash).

For more information, see Creating an Application Load Balancer.

Create an AWS Fargate Task definition

The AWS Fargate Task definition is an important resource, acts as a blueprint for the AWS Fargate task. The Task definition defines parameters such as:

  • Container image URL
  • CPU
  • Memory
  • IAM execution role
  • Host port
  • Container port
  • Log configurations
  • Container networking mode
  • Task type
  • Mount point
  • Volume

A Fargate Task is the running instance of Task definition. Each Task represents a microservice. Tasks can be managed and independently scaled using AWS Fargate Service, which is explained in the upcoming sections.

In the console, choose Task Definitions, Create new Task Definition. For more information, see Creating a Task Definition.

Use the following AWS Fargate Task definition, which based on the reference architecture defined for this walkthrough. Replace <awsaccount> with your own account.

{
  "executionRoleArn": "arn:aws:iam::<awsaccount>:role/ecsTaskExecutionRole",
  "containerDefinitions": [
    {
      "dnsSearchDomains": null,
      "logConfiguration": {
        "logDriver": "awslogs",
        "options": {
          "awslogs-group": "/ecs/aspnetcorefargatetask",
          "awslogs-region": "us-east-1",
          "awslogs-stream-prefix": "ecs"
        }
      },
      "entryPoint": null,
      "portMappings": [
        {
          "hostPort": 80,
          "protocol": "tcp",
          "containerPort": 80
        }
      ],
      "command": null,
      "linuxParameters": null,
      "cpu": 0,
      "environment": [],
      "ulimits": null,
      "dnsServers": null,
      "mountPoints": [],
      "workingDirectory": null,
      "dockerSecurityOptions": null,
      "memory": null,
      "memoryReservation": 1024,
      "volumesFrom": [],
      "image": "<awsaccount>.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/reverseproxy: latest",
      "disableNetworking": null,
      "healthCheck": null,
      "essential": true,
      "links": null,
      "hostname": null,
      "extraHosts": null,
      "user": null,
      "readonlyRootFilesystem": null,
      "dockerLabels": null,
      "privileged": null,
      "name": "reverseproxy"
    },
    {
      "dnsSearchDomains": null,
      "logConfiguration": {
        "logDriver": "awslogs",
        "options": {
          "awslogs-group": "/ecs/aspnetcorefargatetask",
          "awslogs-region": "us-east-1",
          "awslogs-stream-prefix": "ecs"
        }
      },
      "entryPoint": null,
      "portMappings": [
        {
          "hostPort": 5000,
          "protocol": "tcp",
          "containerPort": 5000
        }
      ],
      "command": null,
      "linuxParameters": null,
      "cpu": 0,
      "environment": [],
      "ulimits": null,
      "dnsServers": null,
      "mountPoints": [],
      "workingDirectory": null,
      "dockerSecurityOptions": null,
      "memory": null,
      "memoryReservation": 1024,
      "volumesFrom": [],
      "image": "<awsaccount>.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/mymvcweb:latest",
      "disableNetworking": null,
      "healthCheck": null,
      "essential": true,
      "links": null,
      "hostname": null,
      "extraHosts": null,
      "user": null,
      "readonlyRootFilesystem": null,
      "dockerLabels": null,
      "privileged": null,
      "name": "mymvcweb"
    }
  ],
  "placementConstraints": [],
  "memory": "2048",
  "taskRoleArn": "arn:aws:iam::<awsaccount>:role/aspnetecstaskroles",
  "compatibilities": [
    "EC2",
    "FARGATE"
  ],
  "taskDefinitionArn": "arn:aws:ecs:us-east-1:<awsaccount>:task-definition/aspnetcorefargatetask:1",
  "family": "aspnetcorefargatetask",
  "requiresAttributes": [
    {
      "targetId": null,
      "targetType": null,
      "value": null,
      "name": "ecs.capability.execution-role-ecr-pull"
    },
    {
      "targetId": null,
      "targetType": null,
      "value": null,
      "name": "com.amazonaws.ecs.capability.docker-remote-api.1.18"
    },
    {
      "targetId": null,
      "targetType": null,
      "value": null,
      "name": "ecs.capability.task-eni"
    },
    {
      "targetId": null,
      "targetType": null,
      "value": null,
      "name": "com.amazonaws.ecs.capability.ecr-auth"
    },
    {
      "targetId": null,
      "targetType": null,
      "value": null,
      "name": "com.amazonaws.ecs.capability.task-iam-role"
    },
    {
      "targetId": null,
      "targetType": null,
      "value": null,
      "name": "ecs.capability.execution-role-awslogs"
    },
    {
      "targetId": null,
      "targetType": null,
      "value": null,
      "name": "com.amazonaws.ecs.capability.logging-driver.awslogs"
    },
    {
      "targetId": null,
      "targetType": null,
      "value": null,
      "name": "com.amazonaws.ecs.capability.docker-remote-api.1.21"
    },
    {
      "targetId": null,
      "targetType": null,
      "value": null,
      "name": "com.amazonaws.ecs.capability.docker-remote-api.1.19"
    }
  ],
  "requiresCompatibilities": [
    "FARGATE"
  ],
  "networkMode": "awsvpc",
  "cpu": "1024",
  "revision": 1,
  "status": "ACTIVE",
  "volumes": []
}

The above Task definition contains two containers, the ASP.NET core and the NGINX reverse-proxy server. Currently, awsvpc is the only networking mode supported for AWS Fargate Tasks. When an AWS Fargate Task is launched, the ECS container network plugin assigns a dedicated Elastic Network Interface (ENI) for the Tasks. This ENI does not share the global default network namespace with ECS instances.

You also specify the subnets for placing tasks across ECS instances. This means that the Subnet Security Group is also applicable to the ENI for the respective Tasks. This enables communication between two AWS Fargate Tasks, or other resources within the VPC. Because of the awsvpc network mode, calls from AWS Fargate Tasks do not go through the eth0 Docker bridge.

Create the Amazon ECS service

The AWS Fargate service is a managed AWS Fargate task. The desired state of the application can be defined using the AWS Fargate service. For more information, see Create a service.

In the console, choose Task Definitions and select the task definition that you just created.

On the Task Definition [name] page, select the revision of the task definition from which to create your service.

Review the task definition, and choose Actions, Create Service. For Launch type, choose FARGATE. Enter values for the rest of the fields:

  • Platform version: LATEST
  • Cluster: aspcorefargatecluster (or the cluster name you chose)
  • Service name: aspcorefargatesvc (or another name of your choice)
  • Number of tasks: 2
  • Minimum healthy percent: 50
  • Maximum percent: 200

On the Configure networking page, select the required VPC and subnets required for running the tasks.

Register the Application Load Balancer (ALB) that you created. The ECS scheduler has built-in intelligence, which makes it seamless to work with Application Load Balancer (ALB).

Then, configure Service Auto Scaling. Even though this is an optional feature, I recommend to enable service-level scaling. It addresses the key tenets of how a microservice should behave at runtime. For more information, see (Optional) Configuring Your Service to Use Service Auto Scaling.

I’m defining minimum number of tasks as 2, desired tasks as 2 and maximum tasks as 3.

Complete the Amazon ECS Service creation.

When the Amazon ECS Task gets placed, the ECS scheduler registers the Task as a target for the Load Balancer.

When the Task is healthy and passes the Load Balancer health checks, it is reflected in the healthy host count.

Access the DNS ‘A’ record of the Load Balancer in the browser. The ASP.NET core application should render successfully.

Conclusion

In this post, we took an existing ASP.NET core application, containerized it, and hosted it in Amazon ECS as a microservice using the AWS Fargate compute engine. AWS Fargate gives you a way to run containers directly without managing any EC2 instances and giving you full control over how the task is defined, including task networking and resources.

If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below.

Sundararajan Narasiman is an AWS Partner Solutions Architect

Run your Kubernetes Workloads on Amazon EC2 Spot Instances with Amazon EKS

Post Syndicated from Roshni Pary original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/run-your-kubernetes-workloads-on-amazon-ec2-spot-instances-with-amazon-eks/

Contributed by Madhuri Peri, Sr. EC2 Spot Specialist SA, and Shawn OConnor, AWS Enterprise Solutions Architect

Many organizations today are using containers to package source code and dependencies into lightweight, immutable artifacts that can be deployed reliably to any environment.

Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source framework for automated scheduling and management of containerized workloads. In addition to master nodes, a K8s cluster is made up of worker nodes where containers are scheduled and run.

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) is a managed service that removes the need to manage the installation, scaling, or administration of master nodes and the etcd distributed key-value store. It provides a highly available and secure K8s control plane.

This post demonstrates how to use Spot Instances as K8s worker nodes, and shows the areas of provisioning, automatic scaling, and handling interruptions (termination) of K8s worker nodes across your cluster.

What this post does not cover

This post focuses primarily on EC2 instance scaling. This post also assumes a default interruption mode of terminate for EC2 instances, though there are other interruption types, stop and hibernate. For stateless K8s sessions, I recommend choosing the interruption mode of terminate.

Spot Instances

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances are spare EC2 capacity that offer discounts of 70-90% over On-Demand prices. The Spot price is determined by term trends in supply and demand and the amount of On-Demand capacity on a particular instance size, family, Availability Zone, and AWS Region.

If the available On-Demand capacity of a particular instance type is depleted, the Spot Instance is sent an interruption notice two minutes ahead to gracefully wrap up things. I recommend a diversified fleet of instances, with multiple instance types created by Spot Fleets or EC2 Fleets.

You can use Spot Instances for various fault-tolerant and flexible applications. In a workload that uses container orchestration and management platforms like EKS or Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), the schedulers have built-in mechanisms to identify any pods or containers on these interrupted EC2 instances. The interrupted pods or containers are then replaced on other EC2 instances in the cluster.

Solution architecture

There are three goals to accomplish with this solution:

  1.  The cluster must scale automatically to match the demands of an application.
  2. Optimize for cost by using Spot Instances.
  3. The cluster must be resilient to Spot Instance interruptions.

These goals are accomplished with the following components:

Solution component Role in solution Code Deployment
Cluster Autoscaler Scales EC2 instances in or out Open source K8s pod DaemonSet on On-Demand Instances
Auto Scaling group Provisions Spot or On-Demand Instances AWS Via CloudFormation
Spot Instance interrupt handler Sets K8s nodes to drain state, when the Spot Instance is interrupted Open source K8s pod DaemonSet on all K8s nodes with the label lifecycle=EC2Spot

Here’s a diagram of the solution architecture.

There are a few important things to note in this architecture:

  • Cluster Autoscaler is being used to control all scaling activities, with changes to the MinSize and DesiredCapacity parameters of the Auto Scaling group. This separation of duties ensures that there are no race conditions.
  • The Auto Scaling groups are used purely to replace any lost instances automatically (for example, terminations or interruptions) and maintain the desired number of instances. There are no scaling policies attached to the groups.
  • Auto Scaling, at the time of this post, supports a single instance type. As noted by Jeff Barr’s post EC2 Fleet – Manage Thousands of On-Demand and Spot Instances with One Request, in H2 2018, Auto Scaling groups will support mixed instance types. At that point, multiple groups will not be required, and can collapse into a single group specifying all instance types.

Here’s a further breakdown on the components.

Cluster Autoscaler

Automatic scaling in K8s comes in two forms:

  • Horizontal Pod Autoscaler scales the pods in a deployment or replica set. It is implemented as a K8s API resource and a controller. The controller manager queries the resource utilization against the metrics specified in each HorizontalPodAutoscaler definition. It obtains the metrics from either the resource metrics API (for per-pod resource metrics), or the custom metrics API (for all other metrics).
  • Cluster Autoscaler scales the worker nodes available for pods to be placed. Cluster Autoscaler is the focus for this post.

Cluster Autoscaler is the default K8s component that can be used to perform pod scaling as well as scaling nodes in a cluster. It automatically increases the size of an Auto Scaling group so that pods have a place to run. And it attempts to remove idle nodes, that is, nodes with no running pods.

When a pod cannot be scheduled due to lack of available resources, Cluster Autoscaler determines that the cluster must scale up. Expander interfaces allow you to apply different pod placement strategies. Currently, the following strategies are supported:

  • Random – Randomly select an available node group.
  • Most Pods – Selects the group that can schedule the largest quantity of nodes. This can be used balance the load across groups of nodes.
  • Least Waste – This is commonly referred to as ‘bin packing.’ It selects the node-group with the least available tied resource (CPU or memory). This helps to reduce the total node footprint, and is the strategy used in this post.

Although Cluster Autoscaler is the de facto standard for automatic scaling in K8s, it is not part of the main release. Deploy it like any other pod in the kube-system namespace, like other management pods. Those management pods would prevent the cluster from scaling down. Override this default behavior by passing in the –-skip-nodes-with-system-pods=false flag.

But how do you reliably control scale-down operations so that you do not remove the pods that you need? This is accomplished using a pod disruption budget (PDB). A PDB limits the number of replicated pods that can be down at a given time. Create a PDB to ensure that you always have at least one Cluster Autoscaler pod running

In summary, Cluster Autoscaler does not remove nodes under the following scenarios:

  • Pods with a restrictive PDB.
  • Pods running in the kube-system namespace that are deployed (that is, not run on the node by default or which do not have a PDB).
  • Pods not backed by a controller object (not created by a deployment, replica set, job, stateful-set, and so on).
  • Pods running with local storage.
  • Pods running that cannot be moved elsewhere due to various constraints (lack of resources, non-matching node selectors or affinity, matching anti-affinity, and so on).

Auto Scaling Group

With Spot Instances, each instance type in each Availability Zone is a pool with its own Spot price based on the available capacity. A recommended best practice when working with Spot Instances is to use a diversified fleet of instances with multiple instance types, as created by Spot Fleet or EC2 Fleet. These APIs aim to fulfill the specified TargetCapacity across the instance types to launch the number of Spot Instances and optionally, On-Demand Instances.

Unfortunately, Cluster Autoscaler does not support Spot Fleets at this time. You need a different strategy to provide diversification. Cluster Autoscaler for AWS provides integration with Auto Scaling groups. It enables users to choose from four different options of deployment:

  • One Auto Scaling group
  • Multiple Auto Scaling groups
  • Auto-Discovery
  • Master Node setup

For this post, you use the Multi-ASG deployment option. For Cluster Autoscaler and other cluster administration and management pods that run on EKS worker nodes, create a small Auto Scaling group using On-Demand Instances. This ensures that the health of the cluster is not impacted by Spot interruptions.

In K8s, label selectors are used to control where pods are placed. Use the K8s node label selector to place the appropriate pods on Spot or On-Demand Instances.

Interrupt handler

The last component to consider handles how the cluster responds to the interruption of a Spot Instance. The workflow can be summarized as:

  • Identify that a Spot Instance is being reclaimed.
  • Use the 2-minute notification window to gracefully prepare the node for termination.
  • Taint the node and cordon it off to prevent new pods from being placed.
  • Drain connections on the running pods.
  • To maintain desired capacity, replace the pods on remaining nodes.

Spot interruptions are reported in the following ways:

For this post, you use a K8s DaemonSet, which means running one pod per node. The pod periodically polls the EC2 metadata service for a Spot termination notice. If a termination notice is received (HTTP status 200), then it tries to gracefully stop and restart on other nodes before the 2-minute grace period expires. This approach is based on an existing project at the kube-spot-termination-notice-handler GitHub repo.

 Walkthrough

Here’s the suggested workflow for this solution:

  1. Provision the worker nodes with EC2 instances using CloudFormation templates.
  2. Deploy the K8s Cluster Autoscaler pods as a DaemonSet, with a PDB.
  3. Deploy the Spot Instance interrupt handler pods as a DaemonSet.
  4. Deploy the sample application

Prerequisites

You should have the following resources or configurations before starting this walkthrough:

  • An EKS cluster master endpoint
  • An EKS service role ARN
  • Subnet IDs and the control plane security group values
  • EKS master cluster certificates
  • Configuration of kubectl against the master EKS endpoint

For more information, see Amazon EKS – Now Generally Available and Deploy a Kubernetes Application with Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes.

When you describe the EKS cluster, you get a response like the following sample output:

    "cluster": {
        "name": " DemoSpotClusterScale",
        "arn": "arn:aws:eks:us-west-2: 0123456789012:cluster/ DemoSpotClusterScale",
        "createdAt": 1528317531.751,
        "version": "1.10",
        "endpoint": "https://B960845ED5E21A3439ABB5E12F09CE88.sk1.us-west-2.eks.amazonaws.com",
        "roleArn": "arn:aws:iam::0123456789012:role/eksServiceRoleGA",
        "resourcesVpcConfig": {
            "subnetIds": [
                "subnet-3326464a",
                "subnet-c2b93b89",
                "subnet-13225b49"
            ],
            "securityGroupIds": [
                "sg-7fd0b70e"
            ],
            "vpcId": "vpc-c7c8c4be"
        },
        "status": "ACTIVE",
        "certificateAuthority": {
            "data": "<Your ca data here>"
        }
    }
}

I use the cluster name DemoSpotClusterScale throughout this post. Replace that with your cluster name in the following commands.

Get started

git clone https://github.com/awslabs/ec2-spot-labs.git

cd ec2-spot-labs/ec2-spot-eks-solution

Provision the worker nodes

Add worker nodes to your cluster so that you can deploy your applications. Worker nodes can be either Spot or On-Demand Instances. In this example, use Spot Instances for worker nodes.

You can use this customized AWS CloudFormation template to create the Auto Scaling groups described earlier. This template also labels the node with a lifecycle key value indicating whether it is an On-Demand or Spot Instance node.

The template deploys Auto Scaling groups dedicated to the following instance types:

  • Spot Instances, m4.large, across three Availability Zones.
  • Spot Instances, t2.medium, across three Availability Zones.
  • On-Demand Instances, across three Availability Zones.

Make sure that you apply the aws-auth-cm.yaml file with the appropriate NodeInstanceRole value, as provisioned by the CloudFormation template. Find this parameter on the Resources tab.

kubectl apply -f aws-auth-cm.yaml

If the kubectl get nodes command worked as documented, then you are ready to proceed to the next section

Deploying Cluster Autoscaler and PDB

  1. Download the manifest file cluster-autoscaler-ds.yaml. There are six K8s resources that enable the cluster-autoscaler add-on to work in the EKS environment:
    • Service account
    • Cluster role
    • Role
    • Cluster role binding
    • Role binding
    • Two Auto Scaling groups created by the CloudFormation template for Spot and On-Demand Instances

    You also see the cluster-autoscaler command with configured parameters.

  2. Edit the cluster-autoscaler-ds.yaml file to replace the [OD-NodeGroup-Name], [Spot-NodeGroup1-Name], [Spot-NodeGroup2-Name] sections in lines 141-143 with the resources created in your worker node cloudformation template as shown in screenshot above. Deploy the cluster-autoscaler-ds.yaml manifest 
    $ kubectl create -f cluster-autoscaler/cluster-autoscaler-ds.yaml

  3. Monitor the deployment: 
    $ kubectl logs cluster-autoscaler-<podgeneratedID> --namespace=kube-system

  4. Download and deploy the Cluster Autoscaler PDB: 
    $ kubectl create -f cluster-autoscaler/cluster-autoscaler-pdb.yaml

Deploy the Spot Instance interrupt handler

Each K8s EC2 node being launched must have the lifecycle=Ec2Spot value for -node-label, as in the following example. This line is an excerpt from the CloudFormation template:

“sed -i s,MAX_PODS,”, !Join [ “”, [ “‘”, { “Fn::FindInMap”: [ MaxPodsPerNode, { Ref: SpotNode2InstanceType }, MaxPods ] }, ” –node-labels “, “lifecycle=Ec2Spot” , “‘” ] ], “,g /etc/systemd/system/kubelet.service”, “\n”,

The Docker image contains the instance metadata poll script, as shown in entrypoint.sh. Publish this image to your repository. In the following screenshot, I used my ECR repository. A sample image is available on Docker Hub.

Deploy the Spot interrupt handler pod using spec. This sets up the DaemonSet only on the instances that have a K8s label of lifecycle=Ec2Spot.

kubectl apply -f spot-termination-handler/deploy-k8-pod/spot-interrupt-handler.yaml

When the Spot Instance is interrupted, this pod catches the interruption and vacates the pods.

Deploy the sample application and test out scaling up & down

Deploy a sample application with three replicas. Create a new manifest file named greeter-sample.yaml from the code below, or download it from here

You are using node affinity to prefer deployment on Spot Instances. If the Ec2Spot label is unavailable, the manifest file allows the application to run elsewhere

$ kubectl create -f sample/greeter-sample.yaml

Scale up, and watch Cluster Autoscaler manage the Auto Scaling groups. Verify that Cluster Autoscaler is working by scaling up the sample service beyond the current limits of the cluster.

$ kubectl scale --replicas=50 deployment/greeter-sample

Check the AWS Management Console to confirm that the Auto Scaling groups are scaling up to meet demand. This may take a few minutes. You can also follow along with the pod deployment from the command line. You should see the pods transition from pending to running as nodes are scaled up.

$ kubectl get pods -o wide --watch

Scale down, and watch Cluster Autoscaler manage the Auto Scaling groups:

$ kubectl scale --replicas=1 deployment/greeter

Check the K8s logs to watch the terminations occur:

$ kubectl logs deployment/cluster-autoscaler-<podgeneratedID> –namespace=kube-system

Conclusion

In this post, I showed you how to use Spot Instances with K8s workloads, by provisioning, scaling, and managing terminations effectively in EKS clusters to leverage both cost and scale optimizations. Happy coding!

Building, deploying, and operating containerized applications with AWS Fargate

Post Syndicated from Nathan Taber original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/building-deploying-and-operating-containerized-applications-with-aws-fargate/

This post was contributed by Jason Umiker, AWS Solutions Architect.

Whether it’s helping facilitate a journey to microservices or deploying existing tools more easily and repeatably, many customers are moving toward containerized infrastructure and workflows. AWS provides many of the services and mechanisms to help you with that.

In this post, I show you how to use Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate, as well as AWS CodeBuild and AWS CodePipeline, for an end-to-end CI/CD container solution.

What is Amazon ECS?

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) helps schedule and orchestrate containers across a fleet of servers. It involves installing an agent on each container host that takes instructions from the ECS control plane and relays them to the local Docker image on each one. ECS makes this easy by providing an optimized Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that launches automatically using the ECS console or CLI and that you can use to launch container hosts yourself.

It is up to you to choose the appropriate instance types, sizes, and quantity for your cluster fleet. You should have the capacity to deploy and scale workloads as well as to spread them across enough failure domains for high availability. Features like Auto Scaling groups help with that.

Also, while AWS provides Amazon Linux and Windows AMIs pre-configured for ECS, you are responsible for ongoing maintenance of the OS, which includes patching and security. Items that require regular patching or updating in this model are the OS, Docker, the ECS agent, and of course the contents of the container images.

Two of the key ECS concepts are Tasks and Services. A task is one or more containers that are to be scheduled together by ECS. A service is like an Auto Scaling group for tasks. It defines the quantity of tasks to run across the cluster, where they should be running (for example, across multiple Availability Zones), automatically associates them with a load balancer, and horizontally scales based on metrics that you define like CPI or memory utilization.

What is Fargate?

AWS Fargate is a new compute engine for Amazon ECS that runs containers without requiring you to deploy or manage the underlying Amazon EC2 instances. With Fargate, you specify an image to deploy and the amount of CPU and memory it requires. Fargate handles the updating and securing of the underlying Linux OS, Docker daemon, and ECS agent as well as all the infrastructure capacity management and scaling.

How to use Fargate?

Fargate is exposed as a launch type for ECS. It uses an ECS task and service definition that is similar to the traditional EC2 launch mode, with a few minor differences. It is easy to move tasks and services back and forth between launch types. The differences include:

  • Using the awsvpc network mode
  • Specifying the CPU and memory requirements for the task in the definition

The best way to learn how to use Fargate is to walk through the process and see it in action.

Walkthrough: Deploying a service with Fargate in the console

At the time of publication, Fargate for ECS is available in the N. Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, and Ireland AWS regions. This walkthrough works in any AWS region where Fargate is available.

If you’d prefer to use a CloudFormation template, this one covers Steps 1-4. After launching this template you can skip ahead to Explore Running Service after Step 4.

Step 1 – Create an ECS cluster

An ECS cluster is a logical construct for running groups of containers known as tasks. Clusters can also be used to segregate different environments or teams from each other. In the traditional EC2 launch mode, there are specific EC2 instances associated with and managed by each ECS cluster, but this is transparent to the customer with Fargate.

  1. Open the ECS console and ensure that Fargate is available in the selected Region (for example, N. Virginia).
  2. Choose Clusters, Create Cluster.
  3. Choose Networking only, Next step.
  4. For Cluster name, enter “Fargate”. If you don’t already have a VPC to use, select the Create VPC check box and accept the defaults as well. Choose Create.

Step 2 – Create a task definition, CloudWatch log group, and task execution role

A task is a collection of one or more containers that is the smallest deployable unit of your application. A task definition is a JSON document that serves as the blueprint for ECS to know how to deploy and run your tasks.

The console makes it easier to create this definition by exposing all the parameters graphically. In addition, the console creates two dependencies:

  • The Amazon CloudWatch log group to store the aggregated logs from the task
  • The task execution IAM role that gives Fargate the permissions to run the task
  1. In the left navigation pane, choose Task Definitions, Create new task definition.
  2. Under Select launch type compatibility, choose FARGATE, Next step.
  3. For Task Definition Name, enter NGINX.
  4. If you had an IAM role for your task, you would enter it in Task Role but you don’t need one for this example.
  5. The Network Mode is automatically set to awsvpc for Fargate
  6. Under Task size, for Task memory, choose 0.5 GB. For Task CPU, enter 0.25.
  7. Choose Add container.
  8. For Container name, enter NGINX.
  9. For Image, put nginx:1.13.9-alpine.
  10. For Port mappings type 80 into Container port.
  11. Choose Add, Create.

Step 3 – Create an Application Load Balancer

Sending incoming traffic through a load balancer is often a key piece of making an application both scalable and highly available. It can balance the traffic between multiple tasks, as well as ensure that traffic is only sent to healthy tasks. You can have the service manage the addition or removal of tasks from an Application Load Balancer as they come and go but that must be specified when the service is created. It’s a dependency that you create first.

  1. Open the EC2 console.
  2. In the left navigation pane, choose Load Balancers, Create Load Balancer.
  3. Under Application Load Balancer, choose Create.
  4. For Name, put NGINX.
  5. Choose the appropriate VPC (10.0.0.0/16 if you let ECS create if for you).
  6. For Availability Zones, select both and choose Next: Configure Security Settings.
  7. Choose Next: Configure Security Groups.
  8. For Assign a security group, choose Create a new security group. Choose Next: Configure Routing.
  9. For Name, enter NGINX. For Target type, choose ip.
  10. Choose Next: Register Targets, Next: Review, Create.
  11. Select the new load balancer and note its DNS name (this is the public address for the service).

Step 4 – Create an ECS service using Fargate

A service in ECS using Fargate serves a similar purpose to an Auto Scaling group in EC2. It ensures that the needed number of tasks are running both for scaling as well as spreading the tasks over multiple Availability Zones for high availability. A service creates and destroys tasks as part of its role and can optionally add or remove them from an Application Load Balancer as targets as it does so.

  1. Open the ECS console and ensure that that Fargate is available in the selected Region (for example, N. Virginia).
  2. In the left navigation pane, choose Task Definitions.
  3. Select the NGINX task definition that you created and choose Actions, Create Service.
  4. For Launch Type, select Fargate.
  5. For Service name, enter NGINX.
  6. For Number of tasks, enter 1.
  7. Choose Next step.
  8. Under Subnets, choose both of the options.
  9. For Load balancer type, choose Application Load Balancer. It should then default to the NGINX version that you created earlier.
  10. Choose Add to load balancer.
  11. For Target group name, choose NGINX.
  12. Under DNS records for service discovery, for TTL, enter 60.
  13. Click Next step, Next step, and Create Service.

Explore the running service

At this point, you have a running NGINX service using Fargate. You can now explore what you have running and how it works. You can also ask it to scale up to two tasks across two Availability Zones in the console.

Go into the service and see details about the associated load balancer, tasks, events, metrics, and logs:

Scale the service from one task to multiple tasks:

  • Choose Update.
  • For Number of tasks, enter 2.
  • Choose Next step, Next step, Next step then Update Service.
  • Watch the event that is logged and the new additional task both appear.

On the service Details tab, open the NGINX Target Group Name link and see the IP address registered targets spread across the two zones.

Go to the DNS name for the Application Load Balancer in your browser and see the default NGINX page. Get the value from the Load Balancers dashboard in the EC2 console.

Walkthrough: Adding a CI/CD pipeline to your service

Now, I’m going to show you how to set up a CI/CD pipeline around this service. It watches a GitHub repo for changes and rebuilds the container with CodeBuild based on the buildspec.yml file and Dockerfile in the repo. If that build is successful, it then updates your Fargate service to deploy the new image.

If you’d prefer to use a CloudFormation Template, this one covers the creation of the dependencies so that the console will pre-fill these (CodeBuild Project and IAM Roles) during the creation of the CodePipeline in the steps below.

Step 1 – Create an ECR repository for the rebuilt container image

An ECR repository is a place to store your container images in a secure and reliable manner. Scaling and self-healing of Fargate tasks requires these images to be always available to be pulled when required. This is an important part of a container platform.

  1. Open the ECS console and ensure that that Fargate is available in the selected Region (for example N. Virginia).
  2. In the left navigation pane, under Amazon ECR, choose Repositories, Get started.
  3. For Repository name, put NGINX and choose Next step.

Step 2 – Fork the nginx-codebuild example into your own GitHub account

I have created an example project that takes the Dockerfile and config files for the official NGINX Docker Hub image and adds a buildspec.yml file to tell CodeBuild how to build the container and push it to your new ECR registry on completion. You can fork it into your own GitHub account for this CI/CD demo.

  1. Go to https://github.com/jasonumiker/nginx-codebuild.
  2. In the upper right corner, choose Fork.

Step 3 – Create the pipeline and associated IAM roles

You have two complementary AWS services for building a CI/CD pipeline for your containers. CodeBuild executes the build jobs and CodePipeline kicks off those builds when it notices that the source GitHub or CodeCommit repo changes. If successful, CodePipeline then deploys the new container image to Fargate.

The CodePipeline console can create the associated CodeBuild project, in addition to other dependencies such as the required IAM roles.

  1. Open the CodePipeline console and ensure that that Fargate is available in the selected Region (for example, N. Virginia).
  2. Choose Get started.
  3. For Pipeline name, enter NGINX and choose Next step.
  4. For Source provider, choose GitHub.
  5. Choose Connect to GitHub and log in.
    • For Repository, choose your forked nginx-codebuild repo. For Branch, enter master. Choose Next step.
  6. For Build provider, enter AWS CodeBuild.
  7. Select Create a new build project.
  8. For Project name, enter NGINX.
  9. For Operating system, choose Ubuntu. For Runtime, choose Docker. For Version, select the latest version.
  10. Expand Advanced and set the following environment variables:
    • AWS_ACCOUNT_ID with a value of the account number
    • IMAGE_REPO_NAME with a value of NGINX (or whatever ECR name that you used)
  11. Choose Save build project, Next step.
  12. For Deployment provider, choose Amazon ECS.
  13. For Cluster name, enter Fargate.
  14. For Service name, choose NGINX.
  15. For Image filename, enter images.json.
  16. Choose Next step.
  17. Choose Create role, Allow, Next step, and then choose Create pipeline.
  18. Open the IAM console and ensure that that Fargate is available in the selected Region (for example, N. Virginia).
  19. In the left navigation pane, choose Roles.
  20. Choose the code-build-nginx-service-role that was just created and choose Attach policy.
  21. For Policy type, choose AmazonEC2ContainerRegistryPowerUser and choose Attach policy.

Step 4 – Start the pipeline

You now have CodePipeline watching the GitHub repo for changes. It kicks off a CodeBuild build job on a change and, if the build is successful, creates a new deployment of the Fargate service with the new image.

Make a change to the source repo (even just adding a new dummy file) and then commit it and push it to master on your GitHub fork. This automatically kicks off the pipeline to build and deploy the change.

Conclusion

As you’ve seen, Fargate is fast and easy to set up, integrates well with the rest of the AWS platform, and saves you from much of the heavy lifting of running containers reliably at scale.

While it is useful to go through creating things in the console to understand them better we suggest automating them with infrastructure-as-code patterns via things like our CloudFormation to ensure that they are repeatable, and any changes can be managed. There are some example templates to help you get started in this post.

In addition, adding things like unit and integration testing, blue/green and/or manual approval gates into CodePipeline are often a good idea before deploying patterns like this to production in many organizations. Some additional examples to look at next include:

AWS Online Tech Talks – June 2018

Post Syndicated from Devin Watson original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-online-tech-talks-june-2018/

AWS Online Tech Talks – June 2018

Join us this month to learn about AWS services and solutions. New this month, we have a fireside chat with the GM of Amazon WorkSpaces and our 2nd episode of the “How to re:Invent” series. We’ll also cover best practices, deep dives, use cases and more! Join us and register today!

Note – All sessions are free and in Pacific Time.

Tech talks featured this month:

 

Analytics & Big Data

June 18, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Get Started with Real-Time Streaming Data in Under 5 Minutes – Learn how to use Amazon Kinesis to capture, store, and analyze streaming data in real-time including IoT device data, VPC flow logs, and clickstream data.
June 20, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Insights For Everyone – Deploying Data across your Organization – Learn how to deploy data at scale using AWS Analytics and QuickSight’s new reader role and usage based pricing.

 

AWS re:Invent
June 13, 2018 | 05:00 PM – 05:30 PM PT – Episode 2: AWS re:Invent Breakout Content Secret Sauce – Hear from one of our own AWS content experts as we dive deep into the re:Invent content strategy and how we maintain a high bar.
Compute

June 25, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Accelerating Containerized Workloads with Amazon EC2 Spot Instances – Learn how to efficiently deploy containerized workloads and easily manage clusters at any scale at a fraction of the cost with Spot Instances.

June 26, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Ensuring Your Windows Server Workloads Are Well-Architected – Get the benefits, best practices and tools on running your Microsoft Workloads on AWS leveraging a well-architected approach.

 

Containers
June 25, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Running Kubernetes on AWS – Learn about the basics of running Kubernetes on AWS including how setup masters, networking, security, and add auto-scaling to your cluster.

 

Databases

June 18, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Oracle to Amazon Aurora Migration, Step by Step – Learn how to migrate your Oracle database to Amazon Aurora.
DevOps

June 20, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Set Up a CI/CD Pipeline for Deploying Containers Using the AWS Developer Tools – Learn how to set up a CI/CD pipeline for deploying containers using the AWS Developer Tools.

 

Enterprise & Hybrid
June 18, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – De-risking Enterprise Migration with AWS Managed Services – Learn how enterprise customers are de-risking cloud adoption with AWS Managed Services.

June 19, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Launch AWS Faster using Automated Landing Zones – Learn how the AWS Landing Zone can automate the set up of best practice baselines when setting up new

 

AWS Environments

June 21, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Leading Your Team Through a Cloud Transformation – Learn how you can help lead your organization through a cloud transformation.

June 21, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Enabling New Retail Customer Experiences with Big Data – Learn how AWS can help retailers realize actual value from their big data and deliver on differentiated retail customer experiences.

June 28, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Fireside Chat: End User Collaboration on AWS – Learn how End User Compute services can help you deliver access to desktops and applications anywhere, anytime, using any device.
IoT

June 27, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – AWS IoT in the Connected Home – Learn how to use AWS IoT to build innovative Connected Home products.

 

Machine Learning

June 19, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Integrating Amazon SageMaker into your Enterprise – Learn how to integrate Amazon SageMaker and other AWS Services within an Enterprise environment.

June 21, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Building Text Analytics Applications on AWS using Amazon Comprehend – Learn how you can unlock the value of your unstructured data with NLP-based text analytics.

 

Management Tools

June 20, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Optimizing Application Performance and Costs with Auto Scaling – Learn how selecting the right scaling option can help optimize application performance and costs.

 

Mobile
June 25, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Drive User Engagement with Amazon Pinpoint – Learn how Amazon Pinpoint simplifies and streamlines effective user engagement.

 

Security, Identity & Compliance

June 26, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Understanding AWS Secrets Manager – Learn how AWS Secrets Manager helps you rotate and manage access to secrets centrally.
June 28, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Using Amazon Inspector to Discover Potential Security Issues – See how Amazon Inspector can be used to discover security issues of your instances.

 

Serverless

June 19, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Productionize Serverless Application Building and Deployments with AWS SAM – Learn expert tips and techniques for building and deploying serverless applications at scale with AWS SAM.

 

Storage

June 26, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Deep Dive: Hybrid Cloud Storage with AWS Storage Gateway – Learn how you can reduce your on-premises infrastructure by using the AWS Storage Gateway to connecting your applications to the scalable and reliable AWS storage services.
June 27, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Changing the Game: Extending Compute Capabilities to the Edge – Discover how to change the game for IIoT and edge analytics applications with AWS Snowball Edge plus enhanced Compute instances.
June 28, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Big Data and Analytics Workloads on Amazon EFS – Get best practices and deployment advice for running big data and analytics workloads on Amazon EFS.

Amazon SageMaker Updates – Tokyo Region, CloudFormation, Chainer, and GreenGrass ML

Post Syndicated from Randall Hunt original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/sagemaker-tokyo-summit-2018/

Today, at the AWS Summit in Tokyo we announced a number of updates and new features for Amazon SageMaker. Starting today, SageMaker is available in Asia Pacific (Tokyo)! SageMaker also now supports CloudFormation. A new machine learning framework, Chainer, is now available in the SageMaker Python SDK, in addition to MXNet and Tensorflow. Finally, support for running Chainer models on several devices was added to AWS Greengrass Machine Learning.

Amazon SageMaker Chainer Estimator


Chainer is a popular, flexible, and intuitive deep learning framework. Chainer networks work on a “Define-by-Run” scheme, where the network topology is defined dynamically via forward computation. This is in contrast to many other frameworks which work on a “Define-and-Run” scheme where the topology of the network is defined separately from the data. A lot of developers enjoy the Chainer scheme since it allows them to write their networks with native python constructs and tools.

Luckily, using Chainer with SageMaker is just as easy as using a TensorFlow or MXNet estimator. In fact, it might even be a bit easier since it’s likely you can take your existing scripts and use them to train on SageMaker with very few modifications. With TensorFlow or MXNet users have to implement a train function with a particular signature. With Chainer your scripts can be a little bit more portable as you can simply read from a few environment variables like SM_MODEL_DIR, SM_NUM_GPUS, and others. We can wrap our existing script in a if __name__ == '__main__': guard and invoke it locally or on sagemaker.


import argparse
import os

if __name__ =='__main__':

    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()

    # hyperparameters sent by the client are passed as command-line arguments to the script.
    parser.add_argument('--epochs', type=int, default=10)
    parser.add_argument('--batch-size', type=int, default=64)
    parser.add_argument('--learning-rate', type=float, default=0.05)

    # Data, model, and output directories
    parser.add_argument('--output-data-dir', type=str, default=os.environ['SM_OUTPUT_DATA_DIR'])
    parser.add_argument('--model-dir', type=str, default=os.environ['SM_MODEL_DIR'])
    parser.add_argument('--train', type=str, default=os.environ['SM_CHANNEL_TRAIN'])
    parser.add_argument('--test', type=str, default=os.environ['SM_CHANNEL_TEST'])

    args, _ = parser.parse_known_args()

    # ... load from args.train and args.test, train a model, write model to args.model_dir.

Then, we can run that script locally or use the SageMaker Python SDK to launch it on some GPU instances in SageMaker. The hyperparameters will get passed in to the script as CLI commands and the environment variables above will be autopopulated. When we call fit the input channels we pass will be populated in the SM_CHANNEL_* environment variables.


from sagemaker.chainer.estimator import Chainer
# Create my estimator
chainer_estimator = Chainer(
    entry_point='example.py',
    train_instance_count=1,
    train_instance_type='ml.p3.2xlarge',
    hyperparameters={'epochs': 10, 'batch-size': 64}
)
# Train my estimator
chainer_estimator.fit({'train': train_input, 'test': test_input})

# Deploy my estimator to a SageMaker Endpoint and get a Predictor
predictor = chainer_estimator.deploy(
    instance_type="ml.m4.xlarge",
    initial_instance_count=1
)

Now, instead of bringing your own docker container for training and hosting with Chainer, you can just maintain your script. You can see the full sagemaker-chainer-containers on github. One of my favorite features of the new container is built-in chainermn for easy multi-node distribution of your chainer training jobs.

There’s a lot more documentation and information available in both the README and the example notebooks.

AWS GreenGrass ML with Chainer

AWS GreenGrass ML now includes a pre-built Chainer package for all devices powered by Intel Atom, NVIDIA Jetson, TX2, and Raspberry Pi. So, now GreenGrass ML provides pre-built packages for TensorFlow, Apache MXNet, and Chainer! You can train your models on SageMaker then easily deploy it to any GreenGrass-enabled device using GreenGrass ML.

JAWS UG

I want to give a quick shout out to all of our wonderful and inspirational friends in the JAWS UG who attended the AWS Summit in Tokyo today. I’ve very much enjoyed seeing your pictures of the summit. Thanks for making Japan an amazing place for AWS developers! I can’t wait to visit again and meet with all of you.

– Randall

[$] Easier container security with entitlements

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/755238/rss

During KubeCon
+ CloudNativeCon Europe 2018, Justin Cormack and Nassim Eddequiouaq presented
a proposal to simplify the setting of security parameters for containerized
applications.
Containers depend on a large set of intricate security primitives that can
have weird interactions. Because they are so hard to use, people often just
turn the whole thing off. The goal of the proposal is to make those
controls easier to understand and use; it is partly inspired by mobile apps
on iOS and Android platforms, an idea that trickled back into Microsoft and
Apple desktops. The time seems ripe to improve the field of
container security, which is in desperate need of simpler controls.

Kata Containers 1.0

Post Syndicated from ris original https://lwn.net/Articles/755230/rss

Kata Containers 1.0 has been released. “This first release of Kata Containers completes the merger of Intel’s Clear Containers and Hyper’s runV technologies, and delivers an OCI compatible runtime with seamless integration for container ecosystem technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.”

[$] Securing the container image supply chain

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/754443/rss

“Security is hard” is a tautology, especially in the fast-moving world
of container orchestration. We have previously covered various aspects of
Linux container
security through, for example, the Clear Containers implementation
or the broader question of Kubernetes and
security, but those are mostly concerned with container isolation; they do not address the
question of trusting a container’s contents. What is a container running?
Who built it and when? Even assuming we have good programmers and solid
isolation layers, propagating that good code around a Kubernetes cluster
and making strong assertions on the integrity of that supply chain is far
from trivial. The 2018 KubeCon
+ CloudNativeCon Europe event featured some projects that could
eventually solve that problem.

[$] Updates in container isolation

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/754433/rss

At KubeCon
+ CloudNativeCon Europe 2018, several talks explored the topic of
container isolation and security. The last year saw the release of Kata Containers which, combined with
the CRI-O project, provided strong isolation
guarantees for containers using a hypervisor. During the conference, Google
released its own hypervisor called gVisor, adding yet another
possible solution for this problem. Those new developments prompted the
community to work on integrating the concept of “secure containers”
(or “sandboxed containers”) deeper
into Kubernetes. This work is now coming to fruition; it prompts us to look
again at how Kubernetes tries to keep the bad guys from wreaking havoc once
they break into a container.

[$] Autoscaling for Kubernetes workloads

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/754153/rss

Technologies like containers, clusters, and Kubernetes offer the prospect
of rapidly scaling the available computing resources to match variable demands
placed on the system. Actually implementing that scaling can be a
challenge, though.
During KubeCon
+ CloudNativeCon Europe 2018,
Frederic Branczyk from CoreOS (now
part of Red Hat) held a packed session
to introduce a standard and officially recommended way to scale workloads
automatically in Kubernetes
clusters.

AWS Online Tech Talks – May and Early June 2018

Post Syndicated from Devin Watson original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-online-tech-talks-may-and-early-june-2018/

AWS Online Tech Talks – May and Early June 2018  

Join us this month to learn about some of the exciting new services and solution best practices at AWS. We also have our first re:Invent 2018 webinar series, “How to re:Invent”. Sign up now to learn more, we look forward to seeing you.

Note – All sessions are free and in Pacific Time.

Tech talks featured this month:

Analytics & Big Data

May 21, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Integrating Amazon Elasticsearch with your DevOps Tooling – Learn how you can easily integrate Amazon Elasticsearch Service into your DevOps tooling and gain valuable insight from your log data.

May 23, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Data Warehousing and Data Lake Analytics, Together – Learn how to query data across your data warehouse and data lake without moving data.

May 24, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Data Transformation Patterns in AWS – Discover how to perform common data transformations on the AWS Data Lake.

Compute

May 29, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Creating and Managing a WordPress Website with Amazon Lightsail – Learn about Amazon Lightsail and how you can create, run and manage your WordPress websites with Amazon’s simple compute platform.

May 30, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Accelerating Life Sciences with HPC on AWS – Learn how you can accelerate your Life Sciences research workloads by harnessing the power of high performance computing on AWS.

Containers

May 24, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Building Microservices with the 12 Factor App Pattern on AWS – Learn best practices for building containerized microservices on AWS, and how traditional software design patterns evolve in the context of containers.

Databases

May 21, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – How to Migrate from Cassandra to Amazon DynamoDB – Get the benefits, best practices and guides on how to migrate your Cassandra databases to Amazon DynamoDB.

May 23, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – 5 Hacks for Optimizing MySQL in the Cloud – Learn how to optimize your MySQL databases for high availability, performance, and disaster resilience using RDS.

DevOps

May 23, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – .NET Serverless Development on AWS – Learn how to build a modern serverless application in .NET Core 2.0.

Enterprise & Hybrid

May 22, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Hybrid Cloud Customer Use Cases on AWS – Learn how customers are leveraging AWS hybrid cloud capabilities to easily extend their datacenter capacity, deliver new services and applications, and ensure business continuity and disaster recovery.

IoT

May 31, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Using AWS IoT for Industrial Applications – Discover how you can quickly onboard your fleet of connected devices, keep them secure, and build predictive analytics with AWS IoT.

Machine Learning

May 22, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Using Apache Spark with Amazon SageMaker – Discover how to use Apache Spark with Amazon SageMaker for training jobs and application integration.

May 24, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Introducing AWS DeepLens – Learn how AWS DeepLens provides a new way for developers to learn machine learning by pairing the physical device with a broad set of tutorials, examples, source code, and integration with familiar AWS services.

Management Tools

May 21, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Gaining Better Observability of Your VMs with Amazon CloudWatch – Learn how CloudWatch Agent makes it easy for customers like Rackspace to monitor their VMs.

Mobile

May 29, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Deep Dive on Amazon Pinpoint Segmentation and Endpoint Management – See how segmentation and endpoint management with Amazon Pinpoint can help you target the right audience.

Networking

May 31, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Making Private Connectivity the New Norm via AWS PrivateLink – See how PrivateLink enables service owners to offer private endpoints to customers outside their company.

Security, Identity, & Compliance

May 30, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Introducing AWS Certificate Manager Private Certificate Authority (CA) – Learn how AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA), a managed private CA service, helps you easily and securely manage the lifecycle of your private certificates.

June 1, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Introducing AWS Firewall Manager – Centrally configure and manage AWS WAF rules across your accounts and applications.

Serverless

May 22, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Building API-Driven Microservices with Amazon API Gateway – Learn how to build a secure, scalable API for your application in our tech talk about API-driven microservices.

Storage

May 30, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Accelerate Productivity by Computing at the Edge – Learn how AWS Snowball Edge support for compute instances helps accelerate data transfers, execute custom applications, and reduce overall storage costs.

June 1, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Learn to Build a Cloud-Scale Website Powered by Amazon EFS – Technical deep dive where you’ll learn tips and tricks for integrating WordPress, Drupal and Magento with Amazon EFS.

 

 

 

 

The plan for merging CoreOS into Red Hat

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/754058/rss

The CoreOS blog is carrying an
article describing the path forward now that CoreOS is owned by Red
Hat. “Since Red Hat’s acquisition of CoreOS was announced, we
received questions on the fate of Container Linux. CoreOS’s first project,
and initially its namesake, pioneered the lightweight, ‘over-the-air’
automatically updated container native operating system that fast rose in
popularity running the world’s containers. With the acquisition, Container
Linux will be reborn as Red Hat CoreOS, a new entry into the Red Hat
ecosystem. Red Hat CoreOS will be based on Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise
Linux sources and is expected to ultimately supersede Atomic Host as Red
Hat’s immutable, container-centric operating system.” Some
information can also be found in this
Red Hat press release.

Analyze data in Amazon DynamoDB using Amazon SageMaker for real-time prediction

Post Syndicated from YongSeong Lee original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/analyze-data-in-amazon-dynamodb-using-amazon-sagemaker-for-real-time-prediction/

Many companies across the globe use Amazon DynamoDB to store and query historical user-interaction data. DynamoDB is a fast NoSQL database used by applications that need consistent, single-digit millisecond latency.

Often, customers want to turn their valuable data in DynamoDB into insights by analyzing a copy of their table stored in Amazon S3. Doing this separates their analytical queries from their low-latency critical paths. This data can be the primary source for understanding customers’ past behavior, predicting future behavior, and generating downstream business value. Customers often turn to DynamoDB because of its great scalability and high availability. After a successful launch, many customers want to use the data in DynamoDB to predict future behaviors or provide personalized recommendations.

DynamoDB is a good fit for low-latency reads and writes, but it’s not practical to scan all data in a DynamoDB database to train a model. In this post, I demonstrate how you can use DynamoDB table data copied to Amazon S3 by AWS Data Pipeline to predict customer behavior. I also demonstrate how you can use this data to provide personalized recommendations for customers using Amazon SageMaker. You can also run ad hoc queries using Amazon Athena against the data. DynamoDB recently released on-demand backups to create full table backups with no performance impact. However, it’s not suitable for our purposes in this post, so I chose AWS Data Pipeline instead to create managed backups are accessible from other services.

To do this, I describe how to read the DynamoDB backup file format in Data Pipeline. I also describe how to convert the objects in S3 to a CSV format that Amazon SageMaker can read. In addition, I show how to schedule regular exports and transformations using Data Pipeline. The sample data used in this post is from Bank Marketing Data Set of UCI.

The solution that I describe provides the following benefits:

  • Separates analytical queries from production traffic on your DynamoDB table, preserving your DynamoDB read capacity units (RCUs) for important production requests
  • Automatically updates your model to get real-time predictions
  • Optimizes for performance (so it doesn’t compete with DynamoDB RCUs after the export) and for cost (using data you already have)
  • Makes it easier for developers of all skill levels to use Amazon SageMaker

All code and data set in this post are available in this .zip file.

Solution architecture

The following diagram shows the overall architecture of the solution.

The steps that data follows through the architecture are as follows:

  1. Data Pipeline regularly copies the full contents of a DynamoDB table as JSON into an S3
  2. Exported JSON files are converted to comma-separated value (CSV) format to use as a data source for Amazon SageMaker.
  3. Amazon SageMaker renews the model artifact and update the endpoint.
  4. The converted CSV is available for ad hoc queries with Amazon Athena.
  5. Data Pipeline controls this flow and repeats the cycle based on the schedule defined by customer requirements.

Building the auto-updating model

This section discusses details about how to read the DynamoDB exported data in Data Pipeline and build automated workflows for real-time prediction with a regularly updated model.

Download sample scripts and data

Before you begin, take the following steps:

  1. Download sample scripts in this .zip file.
  2. Unzip the src.zip file.
  3. Find the automation_script.sh file and edit it for your environment. For example, you need to replace 's3://<your bucket>/<datasource path>/' with your own S3 path to the data source for Amazon ML. In the script, the text enclosed by angle brackets—< and >—should be replaced with your own path.
  4. Upload the json-serde-1.3.6-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar file to your S3 path so that the ADD jar command in Apache Hive can refer to it.

For this solution, the banking.csv  should be imported into a DynamoDB table.

Export a DynamoDB table

To export the DynamoDB table to S3, open the Data Pipeline console and choose the Export DynamoDB table to S3 template. In this template, Data Pipeline creates an Amazon EMR cluster and performs an export in the EMRActivity activity. Set proper intervals for backups according to your business requirements.

One core node(m3.xlarge) provides the default capacity for the EMR cluster and should be suitable for the solution in this post. Leave the option to resize the cluster before running enabled in the TableBackupActivity activity to let Data Pipeline scale the cluster to match the table size. The process of converting to CSV format and renewing models happens in this EMR cluster.

For a more in-depth look at how to export data from DynamoDB, see Export Data from DynamoDB in the Data Pipeline documentation.

Add the script to an existing pipeline

After you export your DynamoDB table, you add an additional EMR step to EMRActivity by following these steps:

  1. Open the Data Pipeline console and choose the ID for the pipeline that you want to add the script to.
  2. For Actions, choose Edit.
  3. In the editing console, choose the Activities category and add an EMR step using the custom script downloaded in the previous section, as shown below.

Paste the following command into the new step after the data ­­upload step:

s3://#{myDDBRegion}.elasticmapreduce/libs/script-runner/script-runner.jar,s3://<your bucket name>/automation_script.sh,#{output.directoryPath},#{myDDBRegion}

The element #{output.directoryPath} references the S3 path where the data pipeline exports DynamoDB data as JSON. The path should be passed to the script as an argument.

The bash script has two goals, converting data formats and renewing the Amazon SageMaker model. Subsequent sections discuss the contents of the automation script.

Automation script: Convert JSON data to CSV with Hive

We use Apache Hive to transform the data into a new format. The Hive QL script to create an external table and transform the data is included in the custom script that you added to the Data Pipeline definition.

When you run the Hive scripts, do so with the -e option. Also, define the Hive table with the 'org.openx.data.jsonserde.JsonSerDe' row format to parse and read JSON format. The SQL creates a Hive EXTERNAL table, and it reads the DynamoDB backup data on the S3 path passed to it by Data Pipeline.

Note: You should create the table with the “EXTERNAL” keyword to avoid the backup data being accidentally deleted from S3 if you drop the table.

The full automation script for converting follows. Add your own bucket name and data source path in the highlighted areas.

#!/bin/bash
hive -e "
ADD jar s3://<your bucket name>/json-serde-1.3.6-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar ; 
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS blog_backup_data ;
CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE blog_backup_data (
 customer_id map<string,string>,
 age map<string,string>, job map<string,string>, 
 marital map<string,string>,education map<string,string>, 
 default map<string,string>, housing map<string,string>,
 loan map<string,string>, contact map<string,string>, 
 month map<string,string>, day_of_week map<string,string>, 
 duration map<string,string>, campaign map<string,string>,
 pdays map<string,string>, previous map<string,string>, 
 poutcome map<string,string>, emp_var_rate map<string,string>, 
 cons_price_idx map<string,string>, cons_conf_idx map<string,string>,
 euribor3m map<string,string>, nr_employed map<string,string>, 
 y map<string,string> ) 
ROW FORMAT SERDE 'org.openx.data.jsonserde.JsonSerDe' 
LOCATION '$1/';

INSERT OVERWRITE DIRECTORY 's3://<your bucket name>/<datasource path>/' 
SELECT concat( customer_id['s'],',', 
 age['n'],',', job['s'],',', 
 marital['s'],',', education['s'],',', default['s'],',', 
 housing['s'],',', loan['s'],',', contact['s'],',', 
 month['s'],',', day_of_week['s'],',', duration['n'],',', 
 campaign['n'],',',pdays['n'],',',previous['n'],',', 
 poutcome['s'],',', emp_var_rate['n'],',', cons_price_idx['n'],',',
 cons_conf_idx['n'],',', euribor3m['n'],',', nr_employed['n'],',', y['n'] ) 
FROM blog_backup_data
WHERE customer_id['s'] > 0 ;

After creating an external table, you need to read data. You then use the INSERT OVERWRITE DIRECTORY ~ SELECT command to write CSV data to the S3 path that you designated as the data source for Amazon SageMaker.

Depending on your requirements, you can eliminate or process the columns in the SELECT clause in this step to optimize data analysis. For example, you might remove some columns that have unpredictable correlations with the target value because keeping the wrong columns might expose your model to “overfitting” during the training. In this post, customer_id  columns is removed. Overfitting can make your prediction weak. More information about overfitting can be found in the topic Model Fit: Underfitting vs. Overfitting in the Amazon ML documentation.

Automation script: Renew the Amazon SageMaker model

After the CSV data is replaced and ready to use, create a new model artifact for Amazon SageMaker with the updated dataset on S3.  For renewing model artifact, you must create a new training job.  Training jobs can be run using the AWS SDK ( for example, Amazon SageMaker boto3 ) or the Amazon SageMaker Python SDK that can be installed with “pip install sagemaker” command as well as the AWS CLI for Amazon SageMaker described in this post.

In addition, consider how to smoothly renew your existing model without service impact, because your model is called by applications in real time. To do this, you need to create a new endpoint configuration first and update a current endpoint with the endpoint configuration that is just created.

#!/bin/bash
## Define variable 
REGION=$2
DTTIME=`date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S`
ROLE="<your AmazonSageMaker-ExecutionRole>" 


# Select containers image based on region.  
case "$REGION" in
"us-west-2" )
    IMAGE="174872318107.dkr.ecr.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/linear-learner:latest"
    ;;
"us-east-1" )
    IMAGE="382416733822.dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/linear-learner:latest" 
    ;;
"us-east-2" )
    IMAGE="404615174143.dkr.ecr.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/linear-learner:latest" 
    ;;
"eu-west-1" )
    IMAGE="438346466558.dkr.ecr.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/linear-learner:latest" 
    ;;
 *)
    echo "Invalid Region Name"
    exit 1 ;  
esac

# Start training job and creating model artifact 
TRAINING_JOB_NAME=TRAIN-${DTTIME} 
S3OUTPUT="s3://<your bucket name>/model/" 
INSTANCETYPE="ml.m4.xlarge"
INSTANCECOUNT=1
VOLUMESIZE=5 
aws sagemaker create-training-job --training-job-name ${TRAINING_JOB_NAME} --region ${REGION}  --algorithm-specification TrainingImage=${IMAGE},TrainingInputMode=File --role-arn ${ROLE}  --input-data-config '[{ "ChannelName": "train", "DataSource": { "S3DataSource": { "S3DataType": "S3Prefix", "S3Uri": "s3://<your bucket name>/<datasource path>/", "S3DataDistributionType": "FullyReplicated" } }, "ContentType": "text/csv", "CompressionType": "None" , "RecordWrapperType": "None"  }]'  --output-data-config S3OutputPath=${S3OUTPUT} --resource-config  InstanceType=${INSTANCETYPE},InstanceCount=${INSTANCECOUNT},VolumeSizeInGB=${VOLUMESIZE} --stopping-condition MaxRuntimeInSeconds=120 --hyper-parameters feature_dim=20,predictor_type=binary_classifier  

# Wait until job completed 
aws sagemaker wait training-job-completed-or-stopped --training-job-name ${TRAINING_JOB_NAME}  --region ${REGION}

# Get newly created model artifact and create model
MODELARTIFACT=`aws sagemaker describe-training-job --training-job-name ${TRAINING_JOB_NAME} --region ${REGION}  --query 'ModelArtifacts.S3ModelArtifacts' --output text `
MODELNAME=MODEL-${DTTIME}
aws sagemaker create-model --region ${REGION} --model-name ${MODELNAME}  --primary-container Image=${IMAGE},ModelDataUrl=${MODELARTIFACT}  --execution-role-arn ${ROLE}

# create a new endpoint configuration 
CONFIGNAME=CONFIG-${DTTIME}
aws sagemaker  create-endpoint-config --region ${REGION} --endpoint-config-name ${CONFIGNAME}  --production-variants  VariantName=Users,ModelName=${MODELNAME},InitialInstanceCount=1,InstanceType=ml.m4.xlarge

# create or update the endpoint
STATUS=`aws sagemaker describe-endpoint --endpoint-name  ServiceEndpoint --query 'EndpointStatus' --output text --region ${REGION} `
if [[ $STATUS -ne "InService" ]] ;
then
    aws sagemaker  create-endpoint --endpoint-name  ServiceEndpoint  --endpoint-config-name ${CONFIGNAME} --region ${REGION}    
else
    aws sagemaker  update-endpoint --endpoint-name  ServiceEndpoint  --endpoint-config-name ${CONFIGNAME} --region ${REGION}
fi

Grant permission

Before you execute the script, you must grant proper permission to Data Pipeline. Data Pipeline uses the DataPipelineDefaultResourceRole role by default. I added the following policy to DataPipelineDefaultResourceRole to allow Data Pipeline to create, delete, and update the Amazon SageMaker model and data source in the script.

{
 "Version": "2012-10-17",
 "Statement": [
 {
 "Effect": "Allow",
 "Action": [
 "sagemaker:CreateTrainingJob",
 "sagemaker:DescribeTrainingJob",
 "sagemaker:CreateModel",
 "sagemaker:CreateEndpointConfig",
 "sagemaker:DescribeEndpoint",
 "sagemaker:CreateEndpoint",
 "sagemaker:UpdateEndpoint",
 "iam:PassRole"
 ],
 "Resource": "*"
 }
 ]
}

Use real-time prediction

After you deploy a model into production using Amazon SageMaker hosting services, your client applications use this API to get inferences from the model hosted at the specified endpoint. This approach is useful for interactive web, mobile, or desktop applications.

Following, I provide a simple Python code example that queries against Amazon SageMaker endpoint URL with its name (“ServiceEndpoint”) and then uses them for real-time prediction.

=== Python sample for real-time prediction ===

#!/usr/bin/env python
import boto3
import json 

client = boto3.client('sagemaker-runtime', region_name ='<your region>' )
new_customer_info = '34,10,2,4,1,2,1,1,6,3,190,1,3,4,3,-1.7,94.055,-39.8,0.715,4991.6'
response = client.invoke_endpoint(
    EndpointName='ServiceEndpoint',
    Body=new_customer_info, 
    ContentType='text/csv'
)
result = json.loads(response['Body'].read().decode())
print(result)
--- output(response) ---
{u'predictions': [{u'score': 0.7528127431869507, u'predicted_label': 1.0}]}

Solution summary

The solution takes the following steps:

  1. Data Pipeline exports DynamoDB table data into S3. The original JSON data should be kept to recover the table in the rare event that this is needed. Data Pipeline then converts JSON to CSV so that Amazon SageMaker can read the data.Note: You should select only meaningful attributes when you convert CSV. For example, if you judge that the “campaign” attribute is not correlated, you can eliminate this attribute from the CSV.
  2. Train the Amazon SageMaker model with the new data source.
  3. When a new customer comes to your site, you can judge how likely it is for this customer to subscribe to your new product based on “predictedScores” provided by Amazon SageMaker.
  4. If the new user subscribes your new product, your application must update the attribute “y” to the value 1 (for yes). This updated data is provided for the next model renewal as a new data source. It serves to improve the accuracy of your prediction. With each new entry, your application can become smarter and deliver better predictions.

Running ad hoc queries using Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena is a serverless query service that makes it easy to analyze large amounts of data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is useful for examining data and collecting statistics or informative summaries about data. You can also use the powerful analytic functions of Presto, as described in the topic Aggregate Functions of Presto in the Presto documentation.

With the Data Pipeline scheduled activity, recent CSV data is always located in S3 so that you can run ad hoc queries against the data using Amazon Athena. I show this with example SQL statements following. For an in-depth description of this process, see the post Interactive SQL Queries for Data in Amazon S3 on the AWS News Blog. 

Creating an Amazon Athena table and running it

Simply, you can create an EXTERNAL table for the CSV data on S3 in Amazon Athena Management Console.

=== Table Creation ===
CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE datasource (
 age int, 
 job string, 
 marital string , 
 education string, 
 default string, 
 housing string, 
 loan string, 
 contact string, 
 month string, 
 day_of_week string, 
 duration int, 
 campaign int, 
 pdays int , 
 previous int , 
 poutcome string, 
 emp_var_rate double, 
 cons_price_idx double,
 cons_conf_idx double, 
 euribor3m double, 
 nr_employed double, 
 y int 
)
ROW FORMAT DELIMITED 
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' ESCAPED BY '\\' LINES TERMINATED BY '\n' 
LOCATION 's3://<your bucket name>/<datasource path>/';

The following query calculates the correlation coefficient between the target attribute and other attributes using Amazon Athena.

=== Sample Query ===

SELECT corr(age,y) AS correlation_age_and_target, 
 corr(duration,y) AS correlation_duration_and_target, 
 corr(campaign,y) AS correlation_campaign_and_target,
 corr(contact,y) AS correlation_contact_and_target
FROM ( SELECT age , duration , campaign , y , 
 CASE WHEN contact = 'telephone' THEN 1 ELSE 0 END AS contact 
 FROM datasource 
 ) datasource ;

Conclusion

In this post, I introduce an example of how to analyze data in DynamoDB by using table data in Amazon S3 to optimize DynamoDB table read capacity. You can then use the analyzed data as a new data source to train an Amazon SageMaker model for accurate real-time prediction. In addition, you can run ad hoc queries against the data on S3 using Amazon Athena. I also present how to automate these procedures by using Data Pipeline.

You can adapt this example to your specific use case at hand, and hopefully this post helps you accelerate your development. You can find more examples and use cases for Amazon SageMaker in the video AWS 2017: Introducing Amazon SageMaker on the AWS website.

 

Additional Reading

If you found this post useful, be sure to check out Serving Real-Time Machine Learning Predictions on Amazon EMR and Analyzing Data in S3 using Amazon Athena.

 

About the Author

Yong Seong Lee is a Cloud Support Engineer for AWS Big Data Services. He is interested in every technology related to data/databases and helping customers who have difficulties in using AWS services. His motto is “Enjoy life, be curious and have maximum experience.”

 

 

The Helium Factor and Hard Drive Failure Rates

Post Syndicated from Andy Klein original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/helium-filled-hard-drive-failure-rates/

Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 Helium HDD

In November 2013, the first commercially available helium-filled hard drive was introduced by HGST, a Western Digital subsidiary. The 6 TB drive was not only unique in being helium-filled, it was for the moment, the highest capacity hard drive available. Fast forward a little over 4 years later and 12 TB helium-filled drives are readily available, 14 TB drives can be found, and 16 TB helium-filled drives are arriving soon.

Backblaze has been purchasing and deploying helium-filled hard drives over the past year and we thought it was time to start looking at their failure rates compared to traditional air-filled drives. This post will provide an overview, then we’ll continue the comparison on a regular basis over the coming months.

The Promise and Challenge of Helium Filled Drives

We all know that helium is lighter than air — that’s why helium-filled balloons float. Inside of an air-filled hard drive there are rapidly spinning disk platters that rotate at a given speed, 7200 rpm for example. The air inside adds an appreciable amount of drag on the platters that in turn requires an appreciable amount of additional energy to spin the platters. Replacing the air inside of a hard drive with helium reduces the amount of drag, thereby reducing the amount of energy needed to spin the platters, typically by 20%.

We also know that after a few days, a helium-filled balloon sinks to the ground. This was one of the key challenges in using helium inside of a hard drive: helium escapes from most containers, even if they are well sealed. It took years for hard drive manufacturers to create containers that could contain helium while still functioning as a hard drive. This container innovation allows helium-filled drives to function at spec over the course of their lifetime.

Checking for Leaks

Three years ago, we identified SMART 22 as the attribute assigned to recording the status of helium inside of a hard drive. We have both HGST and Seagate helium-filled hard drives, but only the HGST drives currently report the SMART 22 attribute. It appears the normalized and raw values for SMART 22 currently report the same value, which starts at 100 and goes down.

To date only one HGST drive has reported a value of less than 100, with multiple readings between 94 and 99. That drive continues to perform fine, with no other errors or any correlating changes in temperature, so we are not sure whether the change in value is trying to tell us something or if it is just a wonky sensor.

Helium versus Air-Filled Hard Drives

There are several different ways to compare these two types of drives. Below we decided to use just our 8, 10, and 12 TB drives in the comparison. We did this since we have helium-filled drives in those sizes. We left out of the comparison all of the drives that are 6 TB and smaller as none of the drive models we use are helium-filled. We are open to trying different comparisons. This just seemed to be the best place to start.

Lifetime Hard Drive Failure Rates: Helium vs. Air-Filled Hard Drives table

The most obvious observation is that there seems to be little difference in the Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) based on whether they contain helium or air. One conclusion, given this evidence, is that helium doesn’t affect the AFR of hard drives versus air-filled drives. My prediction is that the helium drives will eventually prove to have a lower AFR. Why? Drive Days.

Let’s go back in time to Q1 2017 when the air-filled drives listed in the table above had a similar number of Drive Days to the current number of Drive Days for the helium drives. We find that the failure rate for the air-filled drives at the time (Q1 2017) was 1.61%. In other words, when the drives were in use a similar number of hours, the helium drives had a failure rate of 1.06% while the failure rate of the air-filled drives was 1.61%.

Helium or Air?

My hypothesis is that after normalizing the data so that the helium and air-filled drives have the same (or similar) usage (Drive Days), the helium-filled drives we use will continue to have a lower Annualized Failure Rate versus the air-filled drives we use. I expect this trend to continue for the next year at least. What side do you come down on? Will the Annualized Failure Rate for helium-filled drives be better than air-filled drives or vice-versa? Or do you think the two technologies will be eventually produce the same AFR over time? Pick a side and we’ll document the results over the next year and see where the data takes us.

The post The Helium Factor and Hard Drive Failure Rates appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

[$] Containers and license compliance

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/752982/rss

Containers are, of course, all the rage these days; in fact, during his
2018 Legal and
Licensing Workshop (LLW) talk, Dirk Hohndel
said with a grin that he hears “containers may take off”. But, while
containers are
easy to set up and use, license compliance for containers is “incredibly
hard”. He has been spending “way too much time” thinking about container
compliance recently and, beyond the standard “let’s go shopping” solution
to hard problems, has come up with some ideas.
Hohndel is a longtime member of the FOSS community who is now the chief
open source officer at VMware—a company that ships some container images.

CI/CD with Data: Enabling Data Portability in a Software Delivery Pipeline with AWS Developer Tools, Kubernetes, and Portworx

Post Syndicated from Kausalya Rani Krishna Samy original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/cicd-with-data-enabling-data-portability-in-a-software-delivery-pipeline-with-aws-developer-tools-kubernetes-and-portworx/

This post is written by Eric Han – Vice President of Product Management Portworx and Asif Khan – Solutions Architect

Data is the soul of an application. As containers make it easier to package and deploy applications faster, testing plays an even more important role in the reliable delivery of software. Given that all applications have data, development teams want a way to reliably control, move, and test using real application data or, at times, obfuscated data.

For many teams, moving application data through a CI/CD pipeline, while honoring compliance and maintaining separation of concerns, has been a manual task that doesn’t scale. At best, it is limited to a few applications, and is not portable across environments. The goal should be to make running and testing stateful containers (think databases and message buses where operations are tracked) as easy as with stateless (such as with web front ends where they are often not).

Why is state important in testing scenarios? One reason is that many bugs manifest only when code is tested against real data. For example, we might simply want to test a database schema upgrade but a small synthetic dataset does not exercise the critical, finer corner cases in complex business logic. If we want true end-to-end testing, we need to be able to easily manage our data or state.

In this blog post, we define a CI/CD pipeline reference architecture that can automate data movement between applications. We also provide the steps to follow to configure the CI/CD pipeline.

 

Stateful Pipelines: Need for Portable Volumes

As part of continuous integration, testing, and deployment, a team may need to reproduce a bug found in production against a staging setup. Here, the hosting environment is comprised of a cluster with Kubernetes as the scheduler and Portworx for persistent volumes. The testing workflow is then automated by AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodePipeline, and AWS CodeBuild.

Portworx offers Kubernetes storage that can be used to make persistent volumes portable between AWS environments and pipelines. The addition of Portworx to the AWS Developer Tools continuous deployment for Kubernetes reference architecture adds persistent storage and storage orchestration to a Kubernetes cluster. The example uses MongoDB as the demonstration of a stateful application. In practice, the workflow applies to any containerized application such as Cassandra, MySQL, Kafka, and Elasticsearch.

Using the reference architecture, a developer calls CodePipeline to trigger a snapshot of the running production MongoDB database. Portworx then creates a block-based, writable snapshot of the MongoDB volume. Meanwhile, the production MongoDB database continues serving end users and is uninterrupted.

Without the Portworx integrations, a manual process would require an application-level backup of the database instance that is outside of the CI/CD process. For larger databases, this could take hours and impact production. The use of block-based snapshots follows best practices for resilient and non-disruptive backups.

As part of the workflow, CodePipeline deploys a new MongoDB instance for staging onto the Kubernetes cluster and mounts the second Portworx volume that has the data from production. CodePipeline triggers the snapshot of a Portworx volume through an AWS Lambda function, as shown here

 

 

 

AWS Developer Tools with Kubernetes: Integrated Workflow with Portworx

In the following workflow, a developer is testing changes to a containerized application that calls on MongoDB. The tests are performed against a staging instance of MongoDB. The same workflow applies if changes were on the server side. The original production deployment is scheduled as a Kubernetes deployment object and uses Portworx as the storage for the persistent volume.

The continuous deployment pipeline runs as follows:

  • Developers integrate bug fix changes into a main development branch that gets merged into a CodeCommit master branch.
  • Amazon CloudWatch triggers the pipeline when code is merged into a master branch of an AWS CodeCommit repository.
  • AWS CodePipeline sends the new revision to AWS CodeBuild, which builds a Docker container image with the build ID.
  • AWS CodeBuild pushes the new Docker container image tagged with the build ID to an Amazon ECR registry.
  • Kubernetes downloads the new container (for the database client) from Amazon ECR and deploys the application (as a pod) and staging MongoDB instance (as a deployment object).
  • AWS CodePipeline, through a Lambda function, calls Portworx to snapshot the production MongoDB and deploy a staging instance of MongoDB• Portworx provides a snapshot of the production instance as the persistent storage of the staging MongoDB
    • The MongoDB instance mounts the snapshot.

At this point, the staging setup mimics a production environment. Teams can run integration and full end-to-end tests, using partner tooling, without impacting production workloads. The full pipeline is shown here.

 

Summary

This reference architecture showcases how development teams can easily move data between production and staging for the purposes of testing. Instead of taking application-specific manual steps, all operations in this CodePipeline architecture are automated and tracked as part of the CI/CD process.

This integrated experience is part of making stateful containers as easy as stateless. With AWS CodePipeline for CI/CD process, developers can easily deploy stateful containers onto a Kubernetes cluster with Portworx storage and automate data movement within their process.

The reference architecture and code are available on GitHub:

● Reference architecture: https://github.com/portworx/aws-kube-codesuite
● Lambda function source code for Portworx additions: https://github.com/portworx/aws-kube-codesuite/blob/master/src/kube-lambda.py

For more information about persistent storage for containers, visit the Portworx website. For more information about Code Pipeline, see the AWS CodePipeline User Guide.