Tag Archives: target

Hiring a Director of Sales

Post Syndicated from Yev original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hiring-a-director-of-sales/

Backblaze is hiring a Director of Sales. This is a critical role for Backblaze as we continue to grow the team. We need a strong leader who has experience in scaling a sales team and who has an excellent track record for exceeding goals by selling Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. In addition, this leader will need to be highly motivated, as well as able to create and develop a highly-motivated, success oriented sales team that has fun and enjoys what they do.

The History of Backblaze from our CEO
In 2007, after a friend’s computer crash caused her some suffering, we realized that with every photo, video, song, and document going digital, everyone would eventually lose all of their information. Five of us quit our jobs to start a company with the goal of making it easy for people to back up their data.

Like many startups, for a while we worked out of a co-founder’s one-bedroom apartment. Unlike most startups, we made an explicit agreement not to raise funding during the first year. We would then touch base every six months and decide whether to raise or not. We wanted to focus on building the company and the product, not on pitching and slide decks. And critically, we wanted to build a culture that understood money comes from customers, not the magical VC giving tree. Over the course of 5 years we built a profitable, multi-million dollar revenue business — and only then did we raise a VC round.

Fast forward 10 years later and our world looks quite different. You’ll have some fantastic assets to work with:

  • A brand millions recognize for openness, ease-of-use, and affordability.
  • A computer backup service that stores over 500 petabytes of data, has recovered over 30 billion files for hundreds of thousands of paying customers — most of whom self-identify as being the people that find and recommend technology products to their friends.
  • Our B2 service that provides the lowest cost cloud storage on the planet at 1/4th the price Amazon, Google or Microsoft charges. While being a newer product on the market, it already has over 100,000 IT and developers signed up as well as an ecosystem building up around it.
  • A growing, profitable and cash-flow positive company.
  • And last, but most definitely not least: a great sales team.

You might be saying, “sounds like you’ve got this under control — why do you need me?” Don’t be misled. We need you. Here’s why:

  • We have a great team, but we are in the process of expanding and we need to develop a structure that will easily scale and provide the most success to drive revenue.
  • We just launched our outbound sales efforts and we need someone to help develop that into a fully successful program that’s building a strong pipeline and closing business.
  • We need someone to work with the marketing department and figure out how to generate more inbound opportunities that the sales team can follow up on and close.
  • We need someone who will work closely in developing the skills of our current sales team and build a path for career growth and advancement.
  • We want someone to manage our Customer Success program.

So that’s a bit about us. What are we looking for in you?

Experience: As a sales leader, you will strategically build and drive the territory’s sales pipeline by assembling and leading a skilled team of sales professionals. This leader should be familiar with generating, developing and closing software subscription (SaaS) opportunities. We are looking for a self-starter who can manage a team and make an immediate impact of selling our Backup and Cloud Storage solutions. In this role, the sales leader will work closely with the VP of Sales, marketing staff, and service staff to develop and implement specific strategic plans to achieve and exceed revenue targets, including new business acquisition as well as build out our customer success program.

Leadership: We have an experienced team who’s brought us to where we are today. You need to have the people and management skills to get them excited about working with you. You need to be a strong leader and compassionate about developing and supporting your team.

Data driven and creative: The data has to show something makes sense before we scale it up. However, without creativity, it’s easy to say “the data shows it’s impossible” or to find a local maximum. Whether it’s deciding how to scale the team, figuring out what our outbound sales efforts should look like or putting a plan in place to develop the team for career growth, we’ve seen a bit of creativity get us places a few extra dollars couldn’t.

Jive with our culture: Strong leaders affect culture and the person we hire for this role may well shape, not only fit into, ours. But to shape the culture you have to be accepted by the organism, which means a certain set of shared values. We default to openness with our team, our customers, and everyone if possible. We love initiative — without arrogance or dictatorship. We work to create a place people enjoy showing up to work. That doesn’t mean ping pong tables and foosball (though we do try to have perks & fun), but it means people are friendly, non-political, working to build a good service but also a good place to work.

Do the work: Ideas and strategy are critical, but good execution makes them happen. We’re looking for someone who can help the team execute both from the perspective of being capable of guiding and organizing, but also someone who is hands-on themselves.

Additional Responsibilities needed for this role:

  • Recruit, coach, mentor, manage and lead a team of sales professionals to achieve yearly sales targets. This includes closing new business and expanding upon existing clientele.
  • Expand the customer success program to provide the best customer experience possible resulting in upsell opportunities and a high retention rate.
  • Develop effective sales strategies and deliver compelling product demonstrations and sales pitches.
  • Acquire and develop the appropriate sales tools to make the team efficient in their daily work flow.
  • Apply a thorough understanding of the marketplace, industry trends, funding developments, and products to all management activities and strategic sales decisions.
  • Ensure that sales department operations function smoothly, with the goal of facilitating sales and/or closings; operational responsibilities include accurate pipeline reporting and sales forecasts.
  • This position will report directly to the VP of Sales and will be staffed in our headquarters in San Mateo, CA.

Requirements:

  • 7 – 10+ years of successful sales leadership experience as measured by sales performance against goals.
    Experience in developing skill sets and providing career growth and opportunities through advancement of team members.
  • Background in selling SaaS technologies with a strong track record of success.
  • Strong presentation and communication skills.
  • Must be able to travel occasionally nationwide.
  • BA/BS degree required

Think you want to join us on this adventure?
Send an email to jobscontact@backblaze.com with the subject “Director of Sales.” (Recruiters and agencies, please don’t email us.) Include a resume and answer these two questions:

  1. How would you approach evaluating the current sales team and what is your process for developing a growth strategy to scale the team?
  2. What are the goals you would set for yourself in the 3 month and 1-year timeframes?

Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope that this sounds like the opportunity for which you’ve been waiting.

Backblaze is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

The post Hiring a Director of Sales appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

The devil wears Pravda

Post Syndicated from Robert Graham original https://blog.erratasec.com/2018/05/the-devil-wears-pravda.html

Classic Bond villain, Elon Musk, has a new plan to create a website dedicated to measuring the credibility and adherence to “core truth” of journalists. He is, without any sense of irony, going to call this “Pravda”. This is not simply wrong but evil.

Musk has a point. Journalists do suck, and many suck consistently. I see this in my own industry, cybersecurity, and I frequently criticize them for their suckage.

But what he’s doing here is not correcting them when they make mistakes (or what Musk sees as mistakes), but questioning their legitimacy. This legitimacy isn’t measured by whether they follow established journalism ethics, but whether their “core truths” agree with Musk’s “core truths”.

An example of the problem is how the press fixates on Tesla car crashes due to its “autopilot” feature. Pretty much every autopilot crash makes national headlines, while the press ignores the other 40,000 car crashes that happen in the United States each year. Musk spies on Tesla drivers (hello, classic Bond villain everyone) so he can see the dip in autopilot usage every time such a news story breaks. He’s got good reason to be concerned about this.

He argues that autopilot is safer than humans driving, and he’s got the statistics and government studies to back this up. Therefore, the press’s fixation on Tesla crashes is illegitimate “fake news”, titillating the audience with distorted truth.

But here’s the thing: that’s still only Musk’s version of the truth. Yes, on a mile-per-mile basis, autopilot is safer, but there’s nuance here. Autopilot is used primarily on freeways, which already have a low mile-per-mile accident rate. People choose autopilot only when conditions are incredibly safe and drivers are unlikely to have an accident anyway. Musk is therefore being intentionally deceptive comparing apples to oranges. Autopilot may still be safer, it’s just that the numbers Musk uses don’t demonstrate this.

And then there is the truth calling it “autopilot” to begin with, because it isn’t. The public is overrating the capabilities of the feature. It’s little different than “lane keeping” and “adaptive cruise control” you can now find in other cars. In many ways, the technology is behind — my Tesla doesn’t beep at me when a pedestrian walks behind my car while backing up, but virtually every new car on the market does.

Yes, the press unduly covers Tesla autopilot crashes, but Musk has only himself to blame by unduly exaggerating his car’s capabilities by calling it “autopilot”.

What’s “core truth” is thus rather difficult to obtain. What the press satisfies itself with instead is smaller truths, what they can document. The facts are in such cases that the accident happened, and they try to get Tesla or Musk to comment on it.

What you can criticize a journalist for is therefore not “core truth” but whether they did journalism correctly. When such stories criticize “autopilot”, but don’t do their diligence in getting Tesla’s side of the story, then that’s a violation of journalistic practice. When I criticize journalists for their poor handling of stories in my industry, I try to focus on which journalistic principles they get wrong. For example, the NYTimes reporters do a lot of stories quoting anonymous government sources in clear violation of journalistic principles.

If “credibility” is the concern, then it’s the classic Bond villain here that’s the problem: Musk himself. His track record on business statements is abysmal. For example, when he announced the Model 3 he claimed production targets that every Wall Street analyst claimed were absurd. He didn’t make those targets, he didn’t come close. Model 3 production is still lagging behind Musk’s twice adjusted targets.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-tracker/

So who has a credibility gap here, the press, or Musk himself?

Not only is Musk’s credibility problem ironic, so is the name he chose, “Pravada”, the Russian word for truth that was the name of the Soviet Union Communist Party’s official newspaper. This is so absurd this has to be a joke, yet Musk claims to be serious about all this.

Yes, the press has a lot of problems, and if Musk were some journalism professor concerned about journalists meeting the objective standards of their industry (e.g. abusing anonymous sources), then this would be a fine thing. But it’s not. It’s Musk who is upset the press’s version of “core truth” does not agree with his version — a version that he’s proven time and time again differs from “real truth”.

Just in case Musk is serious, I’ve already registered “www.antipravda.com” to start measuring the credibility of statements by billionaire playboy CEOs. Let’s see who blinks first.

I stole the title, with permission, from this tweet:

C is to low level

Post Syndicated from Robert Graham original https://blog.erratasec.com/2018/05/c-is-too-low-level.html

I’m in danger of contradicting myself, after previously pointing out that x86 machine code is a high-level language, but this article claiming C is a not a low level language is bunk. C certainly has some problems, but it’s still the closest language to assembly. This is obvious by the fact it’s still the fastest compiled language. What we see is a typical academic out of touch with the real world.

The author makes the (wrong) observation that we’ve been stuck emulating the PDP-11 for the past 40 years. C was written for the PDP-11, and since then CPUs have been designed to make C run faster. The author imagines a different world, such as where CPU designers instead target something like LISP as their preferred language, or Erlang. This misunderstands the state of the market. CPUs do indeed supports lots of different abstractions, and C has evolved to accommodate this.


The author criticizes things like “out-of-order” execution which has lead to the Spectre sidechannel vulnerabilities. Out-of-order execution is necessary to make C run faster. The author claims instead that those resources should be spent on having more slower CPUs, with more threads. This sacrifices single-threaded performance in exchange for a lot more threads executing in parallel. The author cites Sparc Tx CPUs as his ideal processor.

But here’s the thing, the Sparc Tx was a failure. To be fair, it’s mostly a failure because most of the time, people wanted to run old C code instead of new Erlang code. But it was still a failure at running Erlang.

Time after time, engineers keep finding that “out-of-order”, single-threaded performance is still the winner. A good example is ARM processors for both mobile phones and servers. All the theory points to in-order CPUs as being better, but all the products are out-of-order, because this theory is wrong. The custom ARM cores from Apple and Qualcomm used in most high-end phones are so deeply out-of-order they give Intel CPUs competition. The same is true on the server front with the latest Qualcomm Centriq and Cavium ThunderX2 processors, deeply out of order supporting more than 100 instructions in flight.

The Cavium is especially telling. Its ThunderX CPU had 48 simple cores which was replaced with the ThunderX2 having 32 complex, deeply out-of-order cores. The performance increase was massive, even on multithread-friendly workloads. Every competitor to Intel’s dominance in the server space has learned the lesson from Sparc Tx: many wimpy cores is a failure, you need fewer beefy cores. Yes, they don’t need to be as beefy as Intel’s processors, but they need to be close.

Even Intel’s “Xeon Phi” custom chip learned this lesson. This is their GPU-like chip, running 60 cores with 512-bit wide “vector” (sic) instructions, designed for supercomputer applications. Its first version was purely in-order. Its current version is slightly out-of-order. It supports four threads and focuses on basic number crunching, so in-order cores seems to be the right approach, but Intel found in this case that out-of-order processing still provided a benefit. Practice is different than theory.

As an academic, the author of the above article focuses on abstractions. The criticism of C is that it has the wrong abstractions which are hard to optimize, and that if we instead expressed things in the right abstractions, it would be easier to optimize.

This is an intellectually compelling argument, but so far bunk.

The reason is that while the theoretical base language has issues, everyone programs using extensions to the language, like “intrinsics” (C ‘functions’ that map to assembly instructions). Programmers write libraries using these intrinsics, which then the rest of the normal programmers use. In other words, if your criticism is that C is not itself low level enough, it still provides the best access to low level capabilities.

Given that C can access new functionality in CPUs, CPU designers add new paradigms, from SIMD to transaction processing. In other words, while in the 1980s CPUs were designed to optimize C (stacks, scaled pointers), these days CPUs are designed to optimize tasks regardless of language.

The author of that article criticizes the memory/cache hierarchy, claiming it has problems. Yes, it has problems, but only compared to how well it normally works. The author praises the many simple cores/threads idea as hiding memory latency with little caching, but misses the point that caches also dramatically increase memory bandwidth. Intel processors are optimized to read a whopping 256 bits every clock cycle from L1 cache. Main memory bandwidth is orders of magnitude slower.

The author goes onto criticize cache coherency as a problem. C uses it, but other languages like Erlang don’t need it. But that’s largely due to the problems each languages solves. Erlang solves the problem where a large number of threads work on largely independent tasks, needing to send only small messages to each other across threads. The problems C solves is when you need many threads working on a huge, common set of data.

For example, consider the “intrusion prevention system”. Any thread can process any incoming packet that corresponds to any region of memory. There’s no practical way of solving this problem without a huge coherent cache. It doesn’t matter which language or abstractions you use, it’s the fundamental constraint of the problem being solved. RDMA is an important concept that’s moved from supercomputer applications to the data center, such as with memcached. Again, we have the problem of huge quantities (terabytes worth) shared among threads rather than small quantities (kilobytes).

The fundamental issue the author of the the paper is ignoring is decreasing marginal returns. Moore’s Law has gifted us more transistors than we can usefully use. We can’t apply those additional registers to just one thing, because the useful returns we get diminish.

For example, Intel CPUs have two hardware threads per core. That’s because there are good returns by adding a single additional thread. However, the usefulness of adding a third or fourth thread decreases. That’s why many CPUs have only two threads, or sometimes four threads, but no CPU has 16 threads per core.

You can apply the same discussion to any aspect of the CPU, from register count, to SIMD width, to cache size, to out-of-order depth, and so on. Rather than focusing on one of these things and increasing it to the extreme, CPU designers make each a bit larger every process tick that adds more transistors to the chip.

The same applies to cores. It’s why the “more simpler cores” strategy fails, because more cores have their own decreasing marginal returns. Instead of adding cores tied to limited memory bandwidth, it’s better to add more cache. Such cache already increases the size of the cores, so at some point it’s more effective to add a few out-of-order features to each core rather than more cores. And so on.

The question isn’t whether we can change this paradigm and radically redesign CPUs to match some academic’s view of the perfect abstraction. Instead, the goal is to find new uses for those additional transistors. For example, “message passing” is a useful abstraction in languages like Go and Erlang that’s often more useful than sharing memory. It’s implemented with shared memory and atomic instructions, but I can’t help but think it couldn’t better be done with direct hardware support.

Of course, as soon as they do that, it’ll become an intrinsic in C, then added to languages like Go and Erlang.

Summary

Academics live in an ideal world of abstractions, the rest of us live in practical reality. The reality is that vast majority of programmers work with the C family of languages (JavaScript, Go, etc.), whereas academics love the epiphanies they learned using other languages, especially function languages. CPUs are only superficially designed to run C and “PDP-11 compatibility”. Instead, they keep adding features to support other abstractions, abstractions available to C. They are driven by decreasing marginal returns — they would love to add new abstractions to the hardware because it’s a cheap way to make use of additional transitions. Academics are wrong believing that the entire system needs to be redesigned from scratch. Instead, they just need to come up with new abstractions CPU designers can add.

[$] The NOVA filesystem

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/754505/rss

At the 2018 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit, Andiry
Xu presented the NOVA filesystem, which he
is trying to get into the upstream kernel. Unlike existing kernel
filesystems, NOVA exclusively targets non-volatile main memory (NVMM)
rather than
traditional block devices (disks or SSDs). In fact, it does not use the
kernel’s block layer at all and instead uses persistent memory mapped
directly into the kernel address space.

Maliciously Changing Someone’s Address

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/05/maliciously_cha.html

Someone changed the address of UPS corporate headquarters to his own apartment in Chicago. The company discovered it three months later.

The problem, of course, is that there isn’t any authentication of change-of-address submissions:

According to the Postal Service, nearly 37 million change-of-address requests ­ known as PS Form 3575 ­ were submitted in 2017. The form, which can be filled out in person or online, includes a warning below the signature line that “anyone submitting false or inaccurate information” could be subject to fines and imprisonment.

To cut down on possible fraud, post offices send a validation letter to both an old and new address when a change is filed. The letter includes a toll-free number to call to report anything suspicious.

Each year, only a tiny fraction of the requests are ever referred to postal inspectors for investigation. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service could not provide a specific number to the Tribune, but officials have previously said that the number of change-of-address investigations in a given year totals 1,000 or fewer typically.

While fraud involving change-of-address forms has long been linked to identity thieves, the targets are usually unsuspecting individuals, not massive corporations.

[$] XFS online filesystem scrubbing and repair

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/754504/rss

In a filesystem track session at the 2018 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and
Memory-Management Summit (LSFMM), Darrick Wong talked about the online
scrubbing and repair features he has been working on. His target has mostly been
XFS, but he has concurrently been working on scrubbing for ext4.
Part of what he wanted to discuss was the possibility of standardizing some
of these interfaces across different filesystem types.

From Framework to Function: Deploying AWS Lambda Functions for Java 8 using Apache Maven Archetype

Post Syndicated from Ryosuke Iwanaga original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/from-framework-to-function-deploying-aws-lambda-functions-for-java-8-using-apache-maven-archetype/

As a serverless computing platform that supports Java 8 runtime, AWS Lambda makes it easy to run any type of Java function simply by uploading a JAR file. To help define not only a Lambda serverless application but also Amazon API Gateway, Amazon DynamoDB, and other related services, the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) allows developers to use a simple AWS CloudFormation template.

AWS provides the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse that supports both Lambda and SAM. AWS also gives customers an easy way to create Lambda functions and SAM applications in Java using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). After you build a JAR file, all you have to do is type the following commands:

aws cloudformation package 
aws cloudformation deploy

To consolidate these steps, customers can use Archetype by Apache Maven. Archetype uses a predefined package template that makes getting started to develop a function exceptionally simple.

In this post, I introduce a Maven archetype that allows you to create a skeleton of AWS SAM for a Java function. Using this archetype, you can generate a sample Java code example and an accompanying SAM template to deploy it on AWS Lambda by a single Maven action.

Prerequisites

Make sure that the following software is installed on your workstation:

  • Java
  • Maven
  • AWS CLI
  • (Optional) AWS SAM CLI

Install Archetype

After you’ve set up those packages, install Archetype with the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/awslabs/aws-serverless-java-archetype
cd aws-serverless-java-archetype
mvn install

These are one-time operations, so you don’t run them for every new package. If you’d like, you can add Archetype to your company’s Maven repository so that other developers can use it later.

With those packages installed, you’re ready to develop your new Lambda Function.

Start a project

Now that you have the archetype, customize it and run the code:

cd /path/to/project_home
mvn archetype:generate \
  -DarchetypeGroupId=com.amazonaws.serverless.archetypes \
  -DarchetypeArtifactId=aws-serverless-java-archetype \
  -DarchetypeVersion=1.0.0 \
  -DarchetypeRepository=local \ # Forcing to use local maven repository
  -DinteractiveMode=false \ # For batch mode
  # You can also specify properties below interactively if you omit the line for batch mode
  -DgroupId=YOUR_GROUP_ID \
  -DartifactId=YOUR_ARTIFACT_ID \
  -Dversion=YOUR_VERSION \
  -DclassName=YOUR_CLASSNAME

You should have a directory called YOUR_ARTIFACT_ID that contains the files and folders shown below:

├── event.json
├── pom.xml
├── src
│   └── main
│       ├── java
│       │   └── Package
│       │       └── Example.java
│       └── resources
│           └── log4j2.xml
└── template.yaml

The sample code is a working example. If you install SAM CLI, you can invoke it just by the command below:

cd YOUR_ARTIFACT_ID
mvn -P invoke verify
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO]
[INFO] ---------------------------< com.riywo:foo >----------------------------
[INFO] Building foo 1.0
[INFO] --------------------------------[ jar ]---------------------------------
...
[INFO] --- maven-jar-plugin:3.0.2:jar (default-jar) @ foo ---
[INFO] Building jar: /private/tmp/foo/target/foo-1.0.jar
[INFO]
[INFO] --- maven-shade-plugin:3.1.0:shade (shade) @ foo ---
[INFO] Including com.amazonaws:aws-lambda-java-core:jar:1.2.0 in the shaded jar.
[INFO] Replacing /private/tmp/foo/target/lambda.jar with /private/tmp/foo/target/foo-1.0-shaded.jar
[INFO]
[INFO] --- exec-maven-plugin:1.6.0:exec (sam-local-invoke) @ foo ---
2018/04/06 16:34:35 Successfully parsed template.yaml
2018/04/06 16:34:35 Connected to Docker 1.37
2018/04/06 16:34:35 Fetching lambci/lambda:java8 image for java8 runtime...
java8: Pulling from lambci/lambda
Digest: sha256:14df0a5914d000e15753d739612a506ddb8fa89eaa28dcceff5497d9df2cf7aa
Status: Image is up to date for lambci/lambda:java8
2018/04/06 16:34:37 Invoking Package.Example::handleRequest (java8)
2018/04/06 16:34:37 Decompressing /tmp/foo/target/lambda.jar
2018/04/06 16:34:37 Mounting /private/var/folders/x5/ldp7c38545v9x5dg_zmkr5kxmpdprx/T/aws-sam-local-1523000077594231063 as /var/task:ro inside runtime container
START RequestId: a6ae19fe-b1b0-41e2-80bc-68a40d094d74 Version: $LATEST
Log output: Greeting is 'Hello Tim Wagner.'
END RequestId: a6ae19fe-b1b0-41e2-80bc-68a40d094d74
REPORT RequestId: a6ae19fe-b1b0-41e2-80bc-68a40d094d74	Duration: 96.60 ms	Billed Duration: 100 ms	Memory Size: 128 MB	Max Memory Used: 7 MB

{"greetings":"Hello Tim Wagner."}


[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESS
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 10.452 s
[INFO] Finished at: 2018-04-06T16:34:40+09:00
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

This maven goal invokes sam local invoke -e event.json, so you can see the sample output to greet Tim Wagner.

To deploy this application to AWS, you need an Amazon S3 bucket to upload your package. You can use the following command to create a bucket if you want:

aws s3 mb s3://YOUR_BUCKET --region YOUR_REGION

Now, you can deploy your application by just one command!

mvn deploy \
    -DawsRegion=YOUR_REGION \
    -Ds3Bucket=YOUR_BUCKET \
    -DstackName=YOUR_STACK
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO]
[INFO] ---------------------------< com.riywo:foo >----------------------------
[INFO] Building foo 1.0
[INFO] --------------------------------[ jar ]---------------------------------
...
[INFO] --- exec-maven-plugin:1.6.0:exec (sam-package) @ foo ---
Uploading to aws-serverless-java/com.riywo:foo:1.0/924732f1f8e4705c87e26ef77b080b47  11657 / 11657.0  (100.00%)
Successfully packaged artifacts and wrote output template to file target/sam.yaml.
Execute the following command to deploy the packaged template
aws cloudformation deploy --template-file /private/tmp/foo/target/sam.yaml --stack-name <YOUR STACK NAME>
[INFO]
[INFO] --- maven-deploy-plugin:2.8.2:deploy (default-deploy) @ foo ---
[INFO] Skipping artifact deployment
[INFO]
[INFO] --- exec-maven-plugin:1.6.0:exec (sam-deploy) @ foo ---

Waiting for changeset to be created..
Waiting for stack create/update to complete
Successfully created/updated stack - archetype
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESS
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 37.176 s
[INFO] Finished at: 2018-04-06T16:41:02+09:00
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Maven automatically creates a shaded JAR file, uploads it to your S3 bucket, replaces template.yaml, and creates and updates the CloudFormation stack.

To customize the process, modify the pom.xml file. For example, to avoid typing values for awsRegion, s3Bucket or stackName, write them inside pom.xml and check in your VCS. Afterward, you and the rest of your team can deploy the function by typing just the following command:

mvn deploy

Options

Lambda Java 8 runtime has some types of handlers: POJO, Simple type and Stream. The default option of this archetype is POJO style, which requires to create request and response classes, but they are baked by the archetype by default. If you want to use other type of handlers, you can use handlerType property like below:

## POJO type (default)
mvn archetype:generate \
 ...
 -DhandlerType=pojo

## Simple type - String
mvn archetype:generate \
 ...
 -DhandlerType=simple

### Stream type
mvn archetype:generate \
 ...
 -DhandlerType=stream

See documentation for more details about handlers.

Also, Lambda Java 8 runtime supports two types of Logging class: Log4j 2 and LambdaLogger. This archetype creates LambdaLogger implementation by default, but you can use Log4j 2 if you want:

## LambdaLogger (default)
mvn archetype:generate \
 ...
 -Dlogger=lambda

## Log4j 2
mvn archetype:generate \
 ...
 -Dlogger=log4j2

If you use LambdaLogger, you can delete ./src/main/resources/log4j2.xml. See documentation for more details.

Conclusion

So, what’s next? Develop your Lambda function locally and type the following command: mvn deploy !

With this Archetype code example, available on GitHub repo, you should be able to deploy Lambda functions for Java 8 in a snap. If you have any questions or comments, please submit them below or leave them on GitHub.

A serverless solution for invoking AWS Lambda at a sub-minute frequency

Post Syndicated from Emanuele Menga original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/a-serverless-solution-for-invoking-aws-lambda-at-a-sub-minute-frequency/

If you’ve used Amazon CloudWatch Events to schedule the invocation of a Lambda function at regular intervals, you may have noticed that the highest frequency possible is one invocation per minute. However, in some cases, you may need to invoke Lambda more often than that. In this blog post, I’ll cover invoking a Lambda function every 10 seconds, but with some simple math you can change to whatever interval you like.

To achieve this, I’ll show you how to leverage Step Functions and Amazon Kinesis Data Streams.

The Solution

For this example, I’ve created a Step Functions State Machine that invokes our Lambda function 6 times, 10 seconds apart. Such State Machine is then executed once per minute by a CloudWatch Events Rule. This state machine is then executed once per minute by an Amazon CloudWatch Events rule. Finally, the Kinesis Data Stream triggers our Lambda function for each record inserted. The result is our Lambda function being invoked every 10 seconds, indefinitely.

Below is a diagram illustrating how the various services work together.

Step 1: My sampleLambda function doesn’t actually do anything, it just simulates an execution for a few seconds. This is the (Python) code of my dummy function:

import time

import random


def lambda_handler(event, context):

rand = random.randint(1, 3)

print('Running for {} seconds'.format(rand))

time.sleep(rand)

return True

Step 2:

The next step is to create a second Lambda function, that I called Iterator, which has two duties:

  • It keeps track of the current number of iterations, since Step Function doesn’t natively have a state we can use for this purpose.
  • It asynchronously invokes our Lambda function at every loops.

This is the code of the Iterator, adapted from here.

 

import boto3

client = boto3.client('kinesis')

def lambda_handler(event, context):

index = event['iterator']['index'] + 1

response = client.put_record(

StreamName='LambdaSubMinute',

PartitionKey='1',

Data='',

)

return {

'index': index,

'continue': index < event['iterator']['count'],

'count': event['iterator']['count']

}

This function does three things:

  • Increments the counter.
  • Verifies if we reached a count of (in this example) 6.
  • Sends an empty record to the Kinesis Stream.

Now we can create the Step Functions State Machine; the definition is, again, adapted from here.

 

{

"Comment": "Invoke Lambda every 10 seconds",

"StartAt": "ConfigureCount",

"States": {

"ConfigureCount": {

"Type": "Pass",

"Result": {

"index": 0,

"count": 6

},

"ResultPath": "$.iterator",

"Next": "Iterator"

},

"Iterator": {

"Type": "Task",

"Resource": “arn:aws:lambda:REGION:ACCOUNT_ID:function:Iterator",

"ResultPath": "$.iterator",

"Next": "IsCountReached"

},

"IsCountReached": {

"Type": "Choice",

"Choices": [

{

"Variable": "$.iterator.continue",

"BooleanEquals": true,

"Next": "Wait"

}

],

"Default": "Done"

},

"Wait": {

"Type": "Wait",

"Seconds": 10,

"Next": "Iterator"

},

"Done": {

"Type": "Pass",

"End": true

}

}

}

This is how it works:

  1. The state machine starts and sets the index at 0 and the count at 6.
  2. Iterator function is invoked.
  3. If the iterator function reached the end of the loop, the IsCountReached state terminates the execution, otherwise the machine waits for 10 seconds.
  4. The machine loops back to the iterator.

Step 3: Create an Amazon CloudWatch Events rule scheduled to trigger every minute and add the state machine as its target. I’ve actually prepared an Amazon CloudFormation template that creates the whole stack and starts the Lambda invocations, you can find it here.

Performance

Let’s have a look at a sample series of invocations and analyse how precise the timing is. In the following chart I reported the delay (in excess of the expected 10-second-wait) of 30 consecutive invocations of my dummy function, when the Iterator is configured with a memory size of 1024MB.

Invocations Delay

Notice the delay increases by a few hundred milliseconds at every invocation. The good news is it accrues only within the same loop, 6 times; after that, a new CloudWatch Events kicks in and it resets.

This delay  is due to the work that AWS Step Function does outside of the Wait state, the main component of which is the Iterator function itself, that runs synchronously in the state machine and therefore adds up its duration to the 10-second-wait.

As we can easily imagine, the memory size of the Iterator Lambda function does make a difference. Here are the Average and Maximum duration of the function with 256MB, 512MB, 1GB and 2GB of memory.

Average Duration

Maximum Duration


Given those results, I’d say that a memory of 1024MB is a good compromise between costs and performance.

Caveats

As mentioned, in our Amazon CloudWatch Events documentation, in rare cases a rule can be triggered twice, causing two parallel executions of the state machine. If that is a concern, we can add a task state at the beginning of the state machine that checks if any other executions are currently running. If the outcome is positive, then a choice state can immediately terminate the flow. Since the state machine is invoked every 60 seconds and runs for about 50, it is safe to assume that executions should all be sequential and any parallel executions should be treated as duplicates. The task state that checks for current running executions can be a Lambda function similar to the following:

 

import boto3

client = boto3.client('stepfunctions')

def lambda_handler(event, context):

response = client.list_executions(

stateMachineArn='arn:aws:states:REGION:ACCOUNTID:stateMachine:LambdaSubMinute',

statusFilter='RUNNING'

)

return {

'alreadyRunning': len(response['executions']) > 0

}

About the Author

Emanuele Menga, Cloud Support Engineer

 

Practice Makes Perfect: Testing Campaigns Before You Send Them

Post Syndicated from Zach Barbitta original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/practice-makes-perfect-testing-campaigns-before-you-send-them/

In an article we posted to Medium in February, we talked about how to determine the best time to engage your customers by using Amazon Pinpoint’s built-in session heat map. The session heat map allows you to find the times that your customers are most likely to use your app. In this post, we continued on the topic of best practices—specifically, how to appropriately test a campaign before going live.

In this post, we’ll talk about the old adage “practice makes perfect,” and how it applies to the campaigns you send using Amazon Pinpoint. Let’s take a scenario many of our customers encounter daily: creating a campaign to engage users by sending a push notification.

As you can see from the preceding screenshot, the segment we plan to target has nearly 1.7M recipients, which is a lot! Of course, before we got to this step, we already put several best practices into practice. For example, we determined the best time to engage our audience, scheduled the message based on recipients’ local time zones, performed A/B/N testing, measured lift using a hold-out group, and personalized the content for maximum effectiveness. Now that we’re ready to send the notification, we should test the message before we send it to all of the recipients in our segment. The reason for testing the message is pretty straightforward: we want to make sure every detail of the message is accurate before we send it to all 1,687,575 customers.

Fortunately, Amazon Pinpoint makes it easy to test your messages—in fact, you don’t even have to leave the campaign wizard in order to do so. In step 3 of the campaign wizard, below the message editor, there’s a button labelled Test campaign.

When you choose the Test campaign button, you have three options: you can send the test message to a segment of 100 endpoints or less, or to a set of specific endpoint IDs (up to 10), or to a set of specific device tokens (up to 10), as shown in the following image.

In our case, we’ve already created a segment of internal recipients who will test our message. On the Test Campaign window, under Send a test message to, we choose A segment. Then, in the drop-down menu, we select our test segment, and then choose Send test message.

Because we’re sending the test message to a segment, Amazon Pinpoint automatically creates a new campaign dedicated to this test. This process executes a test campaign, complete with message analytics, which allows you to perform end-to-end testing as if you sent the message to your production audience. To see the analytics for your test campaign, go to the Campaigns tab, and then choose the campaign (the name of the campaign contains the word “test”, followed by four random characters, followed by the name of the campaign).

After you complete a successful test, you’re ready to launch your campaign. As a final check, the Review & Launch screen includes a reminder that indicates whether or not you’ve tested the campaign, as shown in the following image.

There are several other ways you can use this feature. For example, you could use it for troubleshooting a campaign, or for iterating on existing campaigns. To learn more about testing campaigns, see the Amazon Pinpoint User Guide.

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.

 

 

 

 

Creating a 1.3 Million vCPU Grid on AWS using EC2 Spot Instances and TIBCO GridServer

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/creating-a-1-3-million-vcpu-grid-on-aws-using-ec2-spot-instances-and-tibco-gridserver/

Many of my colleagues are fortunate to be able to spend a good part of their day sitting down with and listening to our customers, doing their best to understand ways that we can better meet their business and technology needs. This information is treated with extreme care and is used to drive the roadmap for new services and new features.

AWS customers in the financial services industry (often abbreviated as FSI) are looking ahead to the Fundamental Review of Trading Book (FRTB) regulations that will come in to effect between 2019 and 2021. Among other things, these regulations mandate a new approach to the “value at risk” calculations that each financial institution must perform in the four hour time window after trading ends in New York and begins in Tokyo. Today, our customers report this mission-critical calculation consumes on the order of 200,000 vCPUs, growing to between 400K and 800K vCPUs in order to meet the FRTB regulations. While there’s still some debate about the magnitude and frequency with which they’ll need to run this expanded calculation, the overall direction is clear.

Building a Big Grid
In order to make sure that we are ready to help our FSI customers meet these new regulations, we worked with TIBCO to set up and run a proof of concept grid in the AWS Cloud. The periodic nature of the calculation, along with the amount of processing power and storage needed to run it to completion within four hours, make it a great fit for an environment where a vast amount of cost-effective compute power is available on an on-demand basis.

Our customers are already using the TIBCO GridServer on-premises and want to use it in the cloud. This product is designed to run grids at enterprise scale. It runs apps in a virtualized fashion, and accepts requests for resources, dynamically provisioning them on an as-needed basis. The cloud version supports Amazon Linux as well as the PostgreSQL-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora.

Working together with TIBCO, we set out to create a grid that was substantially larger than the current high-end prediction of 800K vCPUs, adding a 50% safety factor and then rounding up to reach 1.3 million vCPUs (5x the size of the largest on-premises grid). With that target in mind, the account limits were raised as follows:

  • Spot Instance Limit – 120,000
  • EBS Volume Limit – 120,000
  • EBS Capacity Limit – 2 PB

If you plan to create a grid of this size, you should also bring your friendly local AWS Solutions Architect into the loop as early as possible. They will review your plans, provide you with architecture guidance, and help you to schedule your run.

Running the Grid
We hit the Go button and launched the grid, watching as it bid for and obtained Spot Instances, each of which booted, initialized, and joined the grid within two minutes. The test workload used the Strata open source analytics & market risk library from OpenGamma and was set up with their assistance.

The grid grew to 61,299 Spot Instances (1.3 million vCPUs drawn from 34 instance types spanning 3 generations of EC2 hardware) as planned, with just 1,937 instances reclaimed and automatically replaced during the run, and cost $30,000 per hour to run, at an average hourly cost of $0.078 per vCPU. If the same instances had been used in On-Demand form, the hourly cost to run the grid would have been approximately $93,000.

Despite the scale of the grid, prices for the EC2 instances did not move during the bidding process. This is due to the overall size of the AWS Cloud and the smooth price change model that we launched late last year.

To give you a sense of the compute power, we computed that this grid would have taken the #1 position on the TOP 500 supercomputer list in November 2007 by a considerable margin, and the #2 position in June 2008. Today, it would occupy position #360 on the list.

I hope that you enjoyed this AWS success story, and that it gives you an idea of the scale that you can achieve in the cloud!

— Jeff;

[$] A mapping layer for filesystems

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/753650/rss

In a plenary session on the second day of the Linux Storage, Filesystem,
and Memory-Management Summit (LSFMM), Dave Chinner described his ideas for
a virtual block address-space layer. It would allow “space accounting to be
shared and managed at various layers in the storage stack”. One of the
targets for this work is for filesystems on thin-provisioned devices, where
the filesystem
is larger than the storage devices holding it (and administrators are
expected to add storage as needed); in current systems, running out of
space causes huge problems for filesystems and users because the filesystem
cannot communicate that error in a usable fashion.

Whimsical builds and messing things up

Post Syndicated from Helen Lynn original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/whimsical-builds-and-messing-things-up/

Today is the early May bank holiday in England and Wales, a public holiday, and while this blog rarely rests, the Pi Towers team does. So, while we take a day with our families, our friends, and/or our favourite pastimes, I thought I’d point you at a couple of features from HackSpace magazine, our monthly magazine for makers.

To my mind, they go quite well with a deckchair in the garden, the buzz of a lawnmower a few houses down, and a view of the weeds I ought to have dealt with by now, but I’m sure you’ll find your own ambience.

Make anything with pencils – HackSpace magazine

If you want a unique piece of jewellery to show your love for pencils, follow Peter Brown’s lead. Peter glued twelve pencils together in two rows of six. He then measured the size of his finger and drilled a hole between the glued pencils using a drill bit.

First off, pencils. It hadn’t occurred to me that you could make super useful stuff like a miniature crossbow and a catapult out of pencils. Not only can you do this, you can probably go ahead and do it right now: all you need is a handful of pencils, some rubber bands, some drawing pins, and a bulldog clip (or, as you might prefer, some push pins and a binder clip). The sentence that really leaps out at me here is “To keep a handful of boys aged three to eleven occupied during a family trip, Marie decided to build mini crossbows to help their target practice.” The internet hasn’t helped me find out much about Marie, but I am in awe of her.

If you haven’t wandered off to make a stationery arsenal by now, read Lucy Rogers‘ reflections on making a right mess of things. I hope you do, because I think it’d be great if more people coped better with the fact that we all, unavoidably, fail. You probably won’t really get anywhere without a few goes where you just completely muck it all up.

A ceramic mug, broken into several pieces on the floor

Never mind. We can always line a plant pot with them.
“In Pieces” by dusk-photography / CC BY

This true of everything. Wet lab work and gardening and coding and parenting. And everything. You can share your heroic failures in the comments, if you like, as well as any historic weaponry you have fashioned from the contents of your desk tidy.

The post Whimsical builds and messing things up appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

The intersection of Customer Engagement and Data Science

Post Syndicated from Brent Meyer original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/the-intersection-of-customer-engagement-and-data-science/

On the Messaging and Targeting team, we’re constantly inspired by the new and novel ways that customers use our services. For example, last year we took an in-depth look at a customer who built a fully featured email marketing platform based on Amazon SES and other AWS Services.

This week, our friends on the AWS Machine Learning team published a blog post that brings together the worlds of data science and customer engagement. Their solution uses Amazon SageMaker (a platform for building and deploying machine learning models) to create a system that makes purchasing predictions based on customers’ past behaviors. It then uses Amazon Pinpoint to send campaigns to customers based on these predictions.

The blog post is an interesting read that includes a primer on the process of creating a useful Machine Learning solution. It then goes in-depth, discussing the real-world considerations that are involved in implementing the solution.

Take a look at their post, Amazon Pinpoint campaigns driven by machine learning on Amazon SageMaker, on the AWS Machine Learning Blog.

Announcing Local Build Support for AWS CodeBuild

Post Syndicated from Karthik Thirugnanasambandam original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/announcing-local-build-support-for-aws-codebuild/

Today, we’re excited to announce local build support in AWS CodeBuild.

AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed build service. There are no servers to provision and scale, or software to install, configure, and operate. You just specify the location of your source code, choose your build settings, and CodeBuild runs build scripts for compiling, testing, and packaging your code.

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to set up CodeBuild locally to build and test a sample Java application.

By building an application on a local machine you can:

  • Test the integrity and contents of a buildspec file locally.
  • Test and build an application locally before committing.
  • Identify and fix errors quickly from your local development environment.

Prerequisites

In this post, I am using AWS Cloud9 IDE as my development environment.

If you would like to use AWS Cloud9 as your IDE, follow the express setup steps in the AWS Cloud9 User Guide.

The AWS Cloud9 IDE comes with Docker and Git already installed. If you are going to use your laptop or desktop machine as your development environment, install Docker and Git before you start.

Steps to build CodeBuild image locally

Run git clone https://github.com/aws/aws-codebuild-docker-images.git to download this repository to your local machine.

$ git clone https://github.com/aws/aws-codebuild-docker-images.git

Lets build a local CodeBuild image for JDK 8 environment. The Dockerfile for JDK 8 is present in /aws-codebuild-docker-images/ubuntu/java/openjdk-8.

Edit the Dockerfile to remove the last line ENTRYPOINT [“dockerd-entrypoint.sh”] and save the file.

Run cd ubuntu/java/openjdk-8 to change the directory in your local workspace.

Run docker build -t aws/codebuild/java:openjdk-8 . to build the Docker image locally. This command will take few minutes to complete.

$ cd aws-codebuild-docker-images
$ cd ubuntu/java/openjdk-8
$ docker build -t aws/codebuild/java:openjdk-8 .

Steps to setup CodeBuild local agent

Run the following Docker pull command to download the local CodeBuild agent.

$ docker pull amazon/aws-codebuild-local:latest --disable-content-trust=false

Now you have the local agent image on your machine and can run a local build.

Run the following git command to download a sample Java project.

$ git clone https://github.com/karthiksambandam/sample-web-app.git

Steps to use the local agent to build a sample project

Let’s build the sample Java project using the local agent.

Execute the following Docker command to run the local agent and build the sample web app repository you cloned earlier.

$ docker run -it -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -e "IMAGE_NAME=aws/codebuild/java:openjdk-8" -e "ARTIFACTS=/home/ec2-user/environment/artifacts" -e "SOURCE=/home/ec2-user/environment/sample-web-app" amazon/aws-codebuild-local

Note: We need to provide three environment variables namely  IMAGE_NAME, SOURCE and ARTIFACTS.

IMAGE_NAME: The name of your build environment image.

SOURCE: The absolute path to your source code directory.

ARTIFACTS: The absolute path to your artifact output folder.

When you run the sample project, you get a runtime error that says the YAML file does not exist. This is because a buildspec.yml file is not included in the sample web project. AWS CodeBuild requires a buildspec.yml to run a build. For more information about buildspec.yml, see Build Spec Example in the AWS CodeBuild User Guide.

Let’s add a buildspec.yml file with the following content to the sample-web-app folder and then rebuild the project.

version: 0.2

phases:
  build:
    commands:
      - echo Build started on `date`
      - mvn install

artifacts:
  files:
    - target/javawebdemo.war


$ docker run -it -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -e "IMAGE_NAME=aws/codebuild/java:openjdk-8" -e "ARTIFACTS=/home/ec2-user/environment/artifacts" -e "SOURCE=/home/ec2-user/environment/sample-web-app" amazon/aws-codebuild-local

This time your build should be successful. Upon successful execution, look in the /artifacts folder for the final built artifacts.zip file to validate.

Conclusion:

In this blog post, I showed you how to quickly set up the CodeBuild local agent to build projects right from your local desktop machine or laptop. As you see, local builds can improve developer productivity by helping you identify and fix errors quickly.

I hope you found this post useful. Feel free to leave your feedback or suggestions in the comments.

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.”

 

 

EC2 Fleet – Manage Thousands of On-Demand and Spot Instances with One Request

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-fleet-manage-thousands-of-on-demand-and-spot-instances-with-one-request/

EC2 Spot Fleets are really cool. You can launch a fleet of Spot Instances that spans EC2 instance types and Availability Zones without having to write custom code to discover capacity or monitor prices. You can set the target capacity (the size of the fleet) in units that are meaningful to your application and have Spot Fleet create and then maintain the fleet on your behalf. Our customers are creating Spot Fleets of all sizes. For example, one financial service customer runs Monte Carlo simulations across 10 different EC2 instance types. They routinely make requests for hundreds of thousands of vCPUs and count on Spot Fleet to give them access to massive amounts of capacity at the best possible price.

EC2 Fleet
Today we are extending and generalizing the set-it-and-forget-it model that we pioneered in Spot Fleet with EC2 Fleet, a new building block that gives you the ability to create fleets that are composed of a combination of EC2 On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot Instances with a single API call. You tell us what you need, capacity and instance-wise, and we’ll handle all the heavy lifting. We will launch, manage, monitor and scale instances as needed, without the need for scaffolding code.

You can specify the capacity of your fleet in terms of instances, vCPUs, or application-oriented units, and also indicate how much of the capacity should be fulfilled by Spot Instances. The application-oriented units allow you to specify the relative power of each EC2 instance type in a way that directly maps to the needs of your application. All three capacity specification options (instances, vCPUs, and application-oriented units) are known as weights.

I think you’ll find a number ways this feature makes managing a fleet of instances easier, and believe that you will also appreciate the team’s near-term feature roadmap of interest (more on that in a bit).

Using EC2 Fleet
There are a number of ways that you can use this feature, whether you’re running a stateless web service, a big data cluster or a continuous integration pipeline. Today I’m going to describe how you can use EC2 Fleet for genomic processing, but this is similar to workloads like risk analysis, log processing or image rendering. Modern DNA sequencers can produce multiple terabytes of raw data each day, to process that data into meaningful information in a timely fashion you need lots of processing power. I’ll be showing you how to deploy a “grid” of worker nodes that can quickly crunch through secondary analysis tasks in parallel.

Projects in genomics can use the elasticity EC2 provides to experiment and try out new pipelines on hundreds or even thousands of servers. With EC2 you can access as many cores as you need and only pay for what you use. Prior to today, you would need to use the RunInstances API or an Auto Scaling group for the On-Demand & Reserved Instance portion of your grid. To get the best price performance you’d also create and manage a Spot Fleet or multiple Spot Auto Scaling groups with different instance types if you wanted to add Spot Instances to turbo-boost your secondary analysis. Finally, to automate scaling decisions across multiple APIs and Auto Scaling groups you would need to write Lambda functions that periodically assess your grid’s progress & backlog, as well as current Spot prices – modifying your Auto Scaling Groups and Spot Fleets accordingly.

You can now replace all of this with a single EC2 Fleet, analyzing genomes at scale for as little as $1 per analysis. In my grid, each step in in the pipeline requires 1 vCPU and 4 GiB of memory, a perfect match for M4 and M5 instances with 4 GiB of memory per vCPU. I will create a fleet using M4 and M5 instances with weights that correspond to the number of vCPUs on each instance:

  • m4.16xlarge – 64 vCPUs, weight = 64
  • m5.24xlarge – 96 vCPUs, weight = 96

This is expressed in a template that looks like this:

"Overrides": [
{
  "InstanceType": "m4.16xlarge",
  "WeightedCapacity": 64,
},
{
  "InstanceType": "m5.24xlarge",
  "WeightedCapacity": 96,
},
]

By default, EC2 Fleet will select the most cost effective combination of instance types and Availability Zones (both specified in the template) using the current prices for the Spot Instances and public prices for the On-Demand Instances (if you specify instances for which you have matching RIs, your discounts will apply). The default mode takes weights into account to get the instances that have the lowest price per unit. So for my grid, fleet will find the instance that offers the lowest price per vCPU.

Now I can request capacity in terms of vCPUs, knowing EC2 Fleet will select the lowest cost option using only the instance types I’ve defined as acceptable. Also, I can specify how many vCPUs I want to launch using On-Demand or Reserved Instance capacity and how many vCPUs should be launched using Spot Instance capacity:

"TargetCapacitySpecification": {
	"TotalTargetCapacity": 2880,
	"OnDemandTargetCapacity": 960,
	"SpotTargetCapacity": 1920,
	"DefaultTargetCapacityType": "Spot"
}

The above means that I want a total of 2880 vCPUs, with 960 vCPUs fulfilled using On-Demand and 1920 using Spot. The On-Demand price per vCPU is lower for m5.24xlarge than the On-Demand price per vCPU for m4.16xlarge, so EC2 Fleet will launch 10 m5.24xlarge instances to fulfill 960 vCPUs. Based on current Spot pricing (again, on a per-vCPU basis), EC2 Fleet will choose to launch 30 m4.16xlarge instances or 20 m5.24xlarges, delivering 1920 vCPUs either way.

Putting it all together, I have a single file (fl1.json) that describes my fleet:

    "LaunchTemplateConfigs": [
        {
            "LaunchTemplateSpecification": {
                "LaunchTemplateId": "lt-0e8c754449b27161c",
                "Version": "1"
            }
        "Overrides": [
        {
          "InstanceType": "m4.16xlarge",
          "WeightedCapacity": 64,
        },
        {
          "InstanceType": "m5.24xlarge",
          "WeightedCapacity": 96,
        },
      ]
        }
    ],
    "TargetCapacitySpecification": {
        "TotalTargetCapacity": 2880,
        "OnDemandTargetCapacity": 960,
        "SpotTargetCapacity": 1920,
        "DefaultTargetCapacityType": "Spot"
    }
}

I can launch my fleet with a single command:

$ aws ec2 create-fleet --cli-input-json file://home/ec2-user/fl1.json
{
    "FleetId":"fleet-838cf4e5-fded-4f68-acb5-8c47ee1b248a"
}

My entire fleet is created within seconds and was built using 10 m5.24xlarge On-Demand Instances and 30 m4.16xlarge Spot Instances, since the current Spot price was 1.5¢ per vCPU for m4.16xlarge and 1.6¢ per vCPU for m5.24xlarge.

Now lets imagine my grid has crunched through its backlog and no longer needs the additional Spot Instances. I can then modify the size of my fleet by changing the target capacity in my fleet specification, like this:

{         
    "TotalTargetCapacity": 960,
}

Since 960 was equal to the amount of On-Demand vCPUs I had requested, when I describe my fleet I will see all of my capacity being delivered using On-Demand capacity:

"TargetCapacitySpecification": {
	"TotalTargetCapacity": 960,
	"OnDemandTargetCapacity": 960,
	"SpotTargetCapacity": 0,
	"DefaultTargetCapacityType": "Spot"
}

When I no longer need my fleet I can delete it and terminate the instances in it like this:

$ aws ec2 delete-fleets --fleet-id fleet-838cf4e5-fded-4f68-acb5-8c47ee1b248a \
  --terminate-instances   
{
    "UnsuccessfulFleetDletetions": [],
    "SuccessfulFleetDeletions": [
        {
            "CurrentFleetState": "deleted_terminating",
            "PreviousFleetState": "active",
            "FleetId": "fleet-838cf4e5-fded-4f68-acb5-8c47ee1b248a"
        }
    ]
}

Earlier I described how RI discounts apply when EC2 Fleet launches instances for which you have matching RIs, so you might be wondering how else RI customers benefit from EC2 Fleet. Let’s say that I own regional RIs for M4 instances. In my EC2 Fleet I would remove m5.24xlarge and specify m4.10xlarge and m4.16xlarge. Then when EC2 Fleet creates the grid, it will quickly find M4 capacity across the sizes and AZs I’ve specified, and my RI discounts apply automatically to this usage.

In the Works
We plan to connect EC2 Fleet and EC2 Auto Scaling groups. This will let you create a single fleet that mixed instance types and Spot, Reserved and On-Demand, while also taking advantage of EC2 Auto Scaling features such as health checks and lifecycle hooks. This integration will also bring EC2 Fleet functionality to services such as Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and AWS Batch that build on and make use of EC2 Auto Scaling for fleet management.

Available Now
You can create and make use of EC2 Fleets today in all public AWS Regions!

— Jeff;