Getting Started with IoT Analytics on AWS
Posted by Gary A. Stafford in AWS, Bash Scripting, Big Data, Cloud, Python, Software Development, Technology Consulting on July 15, 2020
Introduction
AWS defines AWS IoT as a set of managed services that enable ‘internet-connected devices to connect to the AWS Cloud and lets applications in the cloud interact with internet-connected devices.’ AWS IoT services span three categories: Device Software, Connectivity and Control, and Analytics. In this post, we will focus on AWS IoT Analytics, one of four services, which are part of the AWS IoT Analytics category. According to AWS, AWS IoT Analytics is a fully-managed IoT analytics service, designed specifically for IoT, which collects, pre-processes, enriches, stores, and analyzes IoT device data at scale.
Certainly, AWS IoT Analytics is not the only way to analyze the Internet of Things (IoT) or Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) data on AWS. It is common to see Data Analyst teams using a more general AWS data analytics stack, composed of Amazon S3, Amazon Kinesis, AWS Glue, and Amazon Athena or Amazon Redshift and Redshift Spectrum, for analyzing IoT data. So then why choose AWS IoT Analytics over a more traditional AWS data analytics stack? According to AWS, IoT Analytics was purpose-built to manage the complexities of IoT and IIoT data on a petabyte-scale. According to AWS, IoT data frequently has significant gaps, corrupted messages, and false readings that must be cleaned up before analysis can occur. Additionally, IoT data must often be enriched and transformed to be meaningful. IoT Analytics can filter, transform, and enrich IoT data before storing it in a time-series data store for analysis.
In the following post, we will explore the use of AWS IoT Analytics to analyze environmental sensor data, in near real-time, from a series of IoT devices. To follow along with the post’s demonstration, there is an option to use sample data to simulate the IoT devices (see the ‘Simulating IoT Device Messages’ section of this post).
IoT Devices
In this post, we will explore IoT Analytics using IoT data generated from a series of custom-built environmental sensor arrays. Each breadboard-based sensor array is connected to a Raspberry Pi single-board computer (SBC), the popular, low cost, credit-card sized Linux computer. The IoT devices were purposely placed in physical locations that vary in temperature, humidity, and other environmental conditions.
Each device includes the following sensors:
- MQ135 Air Quality Sensor Hazardous Gas Detection Sensor: CO, LPG, Smoke (link)
(requires an MCP3008 – 8-Channel 10-Bit ADC w/ SPI Interface (link)) - DHT22/AM2302 Digital Temperature and Humidity Sensor (link)
- Onyehn IR Pyroelectric Infrared PIR Motion Sensor (link)
- Anmbest Light Intensity Detection Photosensitive Sensor (link)
AWS IoT Device SDK
Each Raspberry Pi device runs a custom Python script, sensor_collector_v2.py. The script uses the AWS IoT Device SDK for Python v2 to communicate with AWS. The script collects a total of seven different readings from the four sensors at a regular interval. Sensor readings include temperature, humidity, carbon monoxide (CO), liquid petroleum gas (LPG), smoke, light, and motion.
The script securely publishes the sensor readings, along with a device ID and timestamp, as a single message, to AWS using the ISO standard Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) network protocol. Below is an example of an MQTT message payload, published by the collector script.
As shown below, using tcpdump on the IoT device, the MQTT message payloads generated by the script average approximately 275 bytes. The complete MQTT messages average around 300 bytes.
AWS IoT Core
Each Raspberry Pi is registered with AWS IoT Core. IoT Core allows users to quickly and securely connect devices to AWS. According to AWS, IoT Core can reliably scale to billions of devices and trillions of messages. Registered devices are referred to as things in AWS IoT Core. A thing is a representation of a specific device or logical entity. Information about a thing is stored in the registry as JSON data.
IoT Core provides a Device Gateway, which manages all active device connections. The Gateway currently supports MQTT, WebSockets, and HTTP 1.1 protocols. Behind the Message Gateway is a high-throughput pub/sub Message Broker, which securely transmits messages to and from all IoT devices and applications with low latency. Below, we see a typical AWS IoT Core architecture.
At a message frequency of five seconds, the three Raspberry Pi devices publish a total of roughly 50,000 IoT messages per day to AWS IoT Core.
AWS IoT Security
AWS IoT Core provides mutual authentication and encryption, ensuring all data is exchanged between AWS and the devices are secure by default. In the demo, all data is sent securely using Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2 with X.509 digital certificates on port 443. Authorization of the device to access any resource on AWS is controlled by individual AWS IoT Core Policies, similar to AWS IAM Policies. Below, we see an example of an X.509 certificate, assigned to a registered device.
AWS IoT Core Rules
Once an MQTT message is received from an IoT device (a thing), we use AWS IoT Rules to send message data to an AWS IoT Analytics Channel. Rules give your devices the ability to interact with AWS services. Rules are written in standard Structured Query Language (SQL). Rules are analyzed, and Actions are performed based on the MQTT topic stream. Below, we see an example rule that forwards our messages to IoT Analytics, in addition to AWS IoT Events and Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose.
Simulating IoT Device Messages
Building and configuring multiple Raspberry Pi-based sensor arrays, and registering the devices with AWS IoT Core would require a lot of work just for this post. Therefore, I have provided everything you need to simulate the three IoT devices, on GitHub. Use the following command to git clone a local copy of the project.
AWS CloudFormation
Use the CloudFormation template, iot-analytics.yaml, to create an IoT Analytics stack containing (17) resources, including the following.
- (3) AWS IoT Things
- (1) AWS IoT Core Topic Rule
- (1) AWS IoT Analytics Channel, Pipeline, Data store, and Data set
- (1) AWS Lambda and Lambda Permission
- (1) Amazon S3 Bucket
- (1) Amazon SageMaker Notebook Instance
- (5) AWS IAM Roles
Please be aware of the costs involved with the AWS resources used in the CloudFormation template before continuing. To build the AWS CloudFormation stack, run the following AWS CLI command.
Below, we see a successful deployment of the IoT Analytics Demo CloudFormation Stack.
Publishing Sample Messages
Once the CloudFormation stack is created successfully, use an included Python script, send_sample_messages.py, to send sample IoT data to an AWS IoT Topic, from your local machine. The script will use your AWS identity and credentials, instead of an actual IoT device registered with IoT Core. The IoT data will be intercepted by an IoT Topic Rule and redirected, using a Topic Rule Action, to the IoT Analytics Channel.
First, we will ensure the IoT stack is running correctly on AWS by sending a few test messages. Go to the AWS IoT Core Test tab. Subscribe to the iot-device-data topic.
Then, run the following command using the smaller data file, raw_data_small.json.
If successful, you should see the five messages appear in the Test tab, shown above. Example output from the script is shown below.
Then, run the second command using the larger data file, raw_data_large.json, containing 9,995 messages (a few hours worth of data). The command will take approximately 12 minutes to complete.
Once the second command completes successfully, your IoT Analytics Channel should contain 10,000 unique messages. There is an optional extra-large data file containing approximately 50,000 IoT messages (24 hours of IoT messages).
AWS IoT Analytics
AWS IoT Analytics is composed of five primary components: Channels, Pipelines, Data stores, Data sets, and Notebooks. These components enable you to collect, prepare, store, analyze, and visualize your IoT data.
Below, we see a typical AWS IoT Analytics architecture. IoT messages are pulled from AWS IoT Core, thought a Rule Action. Amazon QuickSight provides business intelligence, visualization. Amazon QuickSight ML Insights adds anomaly detection and forecasting.
IoT Analytics Channel
An AWS IoT Analytics Channel pulls messages or data into IoT Analytics from other AWS sources, such as Amazon S3, Amazon Kinesis, or Amazon IoT Core. Channels store data for IoT Analytics Pipelines. Both Channels and Data store support storing data in your own Amazon S3 bucket or in an IoT Analytics service-managed S3 bucket. In the demonstration, we are using a service managed S3 bucket.
When creating a Channel, you also decide how long to retain the data. For the demonstration, we have set the data retention period for 14 days. Channels are generally not used for long term storage of data. Typically, you would only retain data in the Channel for the time period you need to analyze. For long term storage of IoT message data, I recommend using an AWS IoT Core Rule to send a copy of the raw IoT data to Amazon S3, using a service such as Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose.
IoT Analytics Pipeline
An AWS IoT Analytics Pipeline consumes messages from one or more Channels. Pipelines transform, filter, and enrich the messages before storing them in IoT Analytics Data stores. A Pipeline is composed of an array of activities. Logically, you must specify both a Channel (source) and a Datastore (destination) activity. Optionally, you may choose as many as 23 additional activities in the pipelineActivities array.
In our demonstration’s Pipeline, iot_analytics_pipeline, we have specified five additional activities, including DeviceRegistryEnrich, Filter, Math, Lambda, and SelectAttributes. There are two additional Activity types we did not choose, RemoveAttributes and AddAttributes.
The demonstration’s Pipeline created by CloudFormation starts with messages from the demonstration’s Channel, iot_analytics_channel, similar to the following.
The demonstration’s Pipeline transforms the messages through a series of Pipeline Activities and then stores the resulting message in the demonstration’s Data store, iot_analytics_data_store. The resulting messages appear similar to the following.
In our demonstration, transformations to the messages include dropping the device_id attribute and converting the temp attribute value to Fahrenheit. In addition, the Lambda Activity rounds down the temp, humidity, co, lpg, and smoke attribute values to between 2–4 decimal places of precision.
The demonstration’s Pipeline also enriches the message with the metadata attribute, containing metadata from the IoT device’s AWS IoT Core Registry. The metadata includes additional information about the device that generated the message, including custom attributes we input, such as location (longitude and latitude) and the device’s installation date.
A significant feature of Pipelines is the ability to reprocess messages. If you make a change to the Pipeline, which often happens during the data preparation stage, you can reprocess any or all messages in the associated Channel, and overwrite the messages in the Data set.
IoT Analytics Data store
An AWS IoT Analytics Data store stores prepared data from an AWS IoT Analytics Pipeline, in a fully-managed database. Both Channels and Data store support storing data in your own Amazon S3 bucket or in an IoT Analytics managed S3 bucket. In the demonstration, we are using a service-managed S3 bucket to store messages in our Data store.
IoT Analytics Data set
An AWS IoT Analytics Data set automatically provides regular, up-to-date insights for data analysts by querying a Data store using standard SQL. Regular updates are provided through the use of a cron expression. For the demonstration, we are using a 15-minute interval.
Below, we see the sample messages in the Result preview pane of the Data set. These are the five test messages we sent to check the stack. Note the SQL query used to obtain the messages, which queries the Data store. The Data store, as you will recall, contains the transformed messages from the Pipeline.
IoT Analytics Data sets also support sending content results, which are materialized views of your IoT Analytics data, to an Amazon S3 bucket.
The CloudFormation stack contains an encrypted Amazon S3 Bucket. This bucket receives a copy of the messages from the IoT Analytics Data set whenever the scheduled update is run by the cron expression.
IoT Analytics Notebook
An AWS IoT Analytics Notebook allows users to perform statistical analysis and machine learning on IoT Analytics Data sets using Jupyter Notebooks. The IoT Analytics Notebook service includes a set of notebook templates that contain AWS-authored machine learning models and visualizations. Notebooks Instances can be linked to a GitHub or other source code repository. Notebooks created with IoT Analytics Notebook can also be accessed directly through Amazon SageMaker. For the demonstration, the Notebooks Instance is associated with the project’s GitHub repository.
The repository contains a sample Jupyter Notebook, IoT_Analytics_Demo_Notebook.ipynb, based on the conda_python3 kernel. This preinstalled environment includes the default Anaconda installation and Python 3. The Notebook uses pandas, matplotlib, and plotly to manipulate and visualize the sample IoT messages we published earlier and stored in the Data set.
Notebooks can be modified, and the changes pushed back to GitHub. You could easily fork a copy of my GitHub repository and modify the CloudFormation template, to include your own GitHub repository URL.
Amazon QuickSight
Amazon QuickSight provides business intelligence (BI) and visualization. Amazon QuickSight ML Insights adds anomaly detection and forecasting. We can use Amazon QuickSight to visualize the IoT message data, stored in the IoT Analytics Data set.
Amazon QuickSight has both a Standard and an Enterprise Edition. AWS provides a detailed product comparison of each edition. For the post, I am demonstrating the Enterprise Edition, which includes additional features, such as ML Insights, hourly refreshes of SPICE (super-fast, parallel, in-memory, calculation engine), and theme customization. Please be aware of the costs of Amazon QuickSight if you choose to follow along with this part of the demo. Amazon QuickSight is enabled or configured with the demonstration’s CloudFormation template.
QuickSight Data Sets
Amazon QuickSight has a wide variety of data source options for creating Amazon QuickSight Data sets, including the ones shown below. Do not confuse Amazon QuickSight Data sets with IoT Analytics Data sets. These are two different, yet similar, constructs.
For the demonstration, we will create an Amazon QuickSight Data set that will use our IoT Analytics Data set as a data source.
Amazon QuickSight gives you the ability to modify QuickSight Data sets. For the demonstration, I have added two additional fields, converting the boolean light and motion values of true and false to binary values of 0 or 1. I have also deselected two fields that I do not need for QuickSight Analysis.
QuickSight provides a wide variety of functions, enabling us to perform dynamic calculations on the field values. Below, we see a new calculated field, light_dec, containing the original light field’s Boolean values converted to binary values. I am using a if...else formula to change the field’s value depending on the value in another field.
QuickSight Analysis
Using the QuickSight Data set, built from the IoT Analytics Data set as a data source, we create a QuickSight Analysis. The QuickSight Analysis user interface is shown below. An Analysis is primarily a collection of Visuals (Visual types). QuickSight provides a number of Visual types. Each visual is associated with a Data set. Data for the QuickSight Analysis or for each individual visual can be filtered. For the demo, I have created a QuickSight Analysis, including several typical QuickSight Visuals.
QuickSight Dashboards
To share a QuickSight Analysis, we can create a QuickSight Dashboard. Below, we see a few views of the QuickSight Analysis, shown above, as a Dashboard. A viewer of the Dashboard cannot edit the visuals, though they can apply filtering and interactively drill-down into data in the Visuals.
Geospatial Data
Amazon QuickSight understands geospatial data. If you recall, in the IoT Analytics Pipeline, we enriched the messages in the metadata from the device registry. The metadata attributes contained the device’s longitude and latitude. Quicksight will recognize those fields as geographic fields. In our QuickSight Analysis, we can visualize the geospatial data, using the geospatial chart (map) Visual type.
QuickSight Mobile App
Amazon QuickSight offers free iOS and Android versions of the Amazon QuickSight Mobile App. The mobile application makes it easy for registered QuickSight end-users to securely connect to QuickSight Dashboards, using their mobile devices. Below, we see two views of the same Dashboard, shown in the iOS version of the Amazon QuickSight Mobile App.
Amazon QuickSight ML Insights
According to Amazon, ML Insights leverages AWS’s machine learning (ML) and natural language capabilities to gain deeper insights from data. QuickSight’s ML-powered Anomaly Detection continuously analyze data to discover anomalies and variations inside of the aggregates, giving you the insights to act when business changes occur. QuickSight’s ML-powered Forecasting can be used to accurately predict your business metrics, and perform interactive what-if analysis with point-and-click simplicity. QuickSight’s built-in algorithms make it easy for anyone to use ML that learns from your data patterns to provide you with accurate predictions based on historical trends.
Below, we see the ML Insights tab in the demonstration’s QuickSight Analysis. Individually detected anomalies can be added to the QuickSight Analysis, similar to Visuals, and configured to tune the detection parameters.
Below, we see an example of humidity anomalies across all devices, based on their Anomaly Score and are higher or lower with a minimum delta of five percent.
Cleaning Up
You are charged hourly for the SageMaker Notebook Instance. Do not forget to delete your CloudFormation stack when you are done with the demonstration. Note the Amazon S3 bucket will not be deleted; you must do this manually.
Conclusion
In this post, we demonstrated how to use AWS IoT Analytics to analyze and visualize streaming messages from multiple IoT devices, in near real-time. Combined with other AWS IoT analytics services, such as AWS IoT SiteWise, AWS IoT Events, and AWS IoT Things Graph, you can create a robust, full-featured IoT Analytics platform, capable of handling millions of industrial, commercial, and residential IoT devices, generating petabytes of data.
This blog represents my own viewpoints and not of my employer, Amazon Web Services.
Architecting a Successful SaaS: Interacting with your Customer’s Cloud Accounts
Posted by Gary A. Stafford in AWS, Cloud, Technology Consulting on June 2, 2020
Originally published on the AWS APN Blog.
Introduction
You’re a software vendor selling a SaaS product hosted on the cloud. As part of your solution, the SaaS product needs to interact with your customer’s cloud-based resources—their data, their applications, or perhaps their compute resources. As a vendor, you must architect your SaaS product, and its capability to interact with your customer’s cloud-based resources to be scalable, reliable, performant, cost optimized, and most importantly, secure. In this post, we will explore several common AWS services and architectural patterns used by SaaS vendors to interact with their customer’s AWS accounts. Although multi-cloud and hybrid cloud SaaS interactions are also prevalent in many SaaS solutions, for brevity we will limit ourselves to interactions across accounts within AWS.
Reasons for Interaction
There are many reasons SaaS products need to interact with a customer’s AWS Accounts. Examples of SaaS products that require some level of account interaction often fall into the categories of logging and monitoring, security, compliance, data analytics, DevOps, workflow management, and resource optimization. SaaS products, such as the ones in these categories, regularly interact with resources in the subscribing customer’s AWS Account. Examples of interactions include the following.
- Data Analytics: A product that connects to private data sources within their customer’s cloud accounts;
- Logging and Monitoring: A product that continuously aggregates, analyzes and visualizes logs from their customer’s cloud accounts;
- Security: A product that uses ML and AI to continuously scan their customer’s cloud accounts for suspicious activities;
- Workflow Management: A product that remotely manages resources in their customer’s cloud account to achieve cost optimization;
- Security: A product that intercepts and inspects traffic, in real-time, to and from their customer’s cloud-based applications, detecting fraud and other malicious activities;
- DevOps: A product that creates resources and deploys assets to their customer’s cloud accounts;
- Compliance: A product that continuously audits their customer’s cloud account activities for regulatory compliance and corporate governance violations;
Scaling Interactions
As individuals and businesses, we often interact and share resources between our own AWS Accounts. We can delegate access across our accounts using AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) or IAM Roles, referred to as cross-account access. A typical example is allowing a Developer, an IAM User in the Development account, limited access to the Production account, to troubleshoot a customer issue. We can implement cross-account VPC Sharing within our AWS Organization or VPC Peering to route traffic, privately, between two or more accounts. These methods are used when applications, deployed to different AWS Accounts, such as accounting and shipping, need to communicate with each other.
Below, we see a typical example of an Enterprise AWS account structure, modeled around the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and using good DevOps practices.
Cloud services and architectural patterns that work for an individual customer of the cloud, may not scale for a SaaS vendor. Implementing a scalable and reliable architecture to interact with tens, hundreds, or thousands of a SaaS vendor’s customer’s AWS Accounts, can be vastly more complex and challenging than across a single organization’s accounts, even a large organization. Similarly, losing or exposing data can be devastating to an organization. Losing or exposing hundreds or thousands of SaaS customer’s data and potentially their own customer’s data is likely fatal to a SaaS vendor’s reputation and their business.
Below, we see a typical example of a SaaS vendor’s AWS account structure, modeled around a multi-tier pricing and support strategy. Free Trial and Business customers are pooled together using a multi-tenant architecture, while enterprise customers are isolated using a single-tenant architecture.
Tenancy Model
The tenant isolation strategy of a SaaS vendor can have a direct impact on the methods the vendor implements to integrate with their customer’s accounts. For those unfamiliar with the terms Tenancy Model or Tenant Isolation, think housing. A tenant (a SaaS vendor’s customer) might reside in a single-family house, referred to as a single-tenant architecture. The tenant is isolated or siloed from their neighbors (other SaaS customers). Alternately, a tenant might reside in an apartment building, living adjacent to other tenants, referred to as multi-tenant architecture. Tenants (customers) share the same structure with limited isolation compared to single-tenant architecture. Multiple customer resources are pooled. To learn more about tenancy, I recommend the presentation, AWS re:Invent 2019: SaaS tenant isolation patterns, available on YouTube, by Tod Golding of AWS.
An application’s tenancy model is seldom binary. The degree to which SaaS customer’s resources are isolated or conversely, pooled, varies based on a vendor’s architecture and is influenced by the underlying technologies used by the vendor. Different tiers of the application—front-end, back-end, data—may differ in their degree and means of tenant isolation. For example, on AWS, isolation may be achieved at different levels of the network. A SaaS vendor may assign each customer to their own AWS Account, providing a very high level of isolation. Alternatively, a vendor might choose to use a single account and separate customers within their own VPC. Customers may be housed within the same VPC, but separated by compute instance or other software constructs.
Additionally, many SaaS vendors have more than one tenancy model. Frequently, a SaaS vendor will offer a multi-tier pricing structure. For example, a Business Tier, which is based on a shared, multi-tenant architecture, and an Enterprise Tier, which is based on an isolated, single-tenant architecture. Vendors may also offer a free tier or trial offer, which is almost always multi-tenant.
The cloud services and architectural patterns used by vendors to integrate with customer accounts, each have their own advantages and disadvantages. Some AWS services and architectural patterns may be inherently better at scaling to meet a SaaS vendor’s large growing customer base. They are well-suited for multi-tenant architecture. Other services and architectural patterns may provide a high level of interaction but lack scalability. They may be better suited for a single-tenant architecture.
AWS Services
There are several AWS services capable of enabling integrations between a vendor’s SaaS product and their customer’s resources, within their AWS Accounts. Some AWS services were even designed with SaaS in mind, including AWS PrivateLink and Amazon EventBridge. Services are often combined in common architectural patterns. Here are eight examples of AWS services capable of enabling integrations between a vendor’s SaaS product and their customer’s resources, within their AWS Accounts.
Cross-Account IAM Roles
According to AWS, customers can use an IAM Role to delegate access to resources that are in different AWS accounts, often referred to as a cross-account role. With IAM roles, you can establish trust relationships between your trusting account and other AWS trusted accounts. By setting up cross-account access in this way, you do not need to create individual IAM users in each account. With IAM roles, you can establish trust relationships between your trusting account and other AWS trusted accounts.
External IDs
Using External IDs are a good way to improve the security of cross-account role handling in a SaaS solution, and should be used by vendors who are implementing a SaaS product that uses cross-account roles. Choosing this option restricts access to the role only through the AWS CLI, Tools for Windows PowerShell, or the AWS API.
Using cross-account roles with external IDs, a SaaS customer allows their SaaS vendor programmatic access to their AWS account. The cross-account role’s policies tightly control the permissions of the vendor (trusted account) and limit access within the customer’s account (trusting account). Vendors use cross-account access for many activities, including resource optimization, DevOps functions, patching and upgrades, and managing their agents.
AWS Transfer for SFTP
According to AWS, AWS Transfer for SFTP is a fully managed service that enables the transfer of files directly into and out of Amazon S3 using the Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP)—also known as Secure Shell (SSH) File Transfer Protocol. Announced in November 2018, AWS SFTP is fully compatible with the SFTP standard, connects to your Active Directory, LDAP, and other identity systems, and works with Route 53 DNS routing.
Using S3 to transfer objects (files) between a SaaS vendor’s account and their customer’s account is very common. There are multiple AWS services, including AWS Transfer for SFTP, which can be used to interact with a customer’s account using S3. A vendor may choose to pull from or push to the customer’s S3 bucket using one of these services. Alternately, a customer might push to or pull from a vendor’s S3 bucket, as shown below.
To use AWS Transfer for SFTP, you set up users and assign them each an IAM role. This role determines the level of access that they have to your S3 bucket. When you create an SFTP user, you make several decisions about user access. These include which Amazon S3 buckets the user can access, what portions of each S3 bucket are accessible, and what privileges the user has, for example, PUT or GET.
Below, we see an example of the SaaS vendor exposing a secure FTP site, backed by S3. The customers use SFTP to exchange data between their account and their SaaS application. File transfer may be managed by the customer or by a vendor agent, deployed into the customer’s account.
In late April 2020, AWS announced AWS Transfer Family, which is the aggregated name of AWS Transfer for SFTP, FTPS, and FTP. In addition to Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), announce the expansion of the service to add support for File Transfer Protocol over SSL (FTPS) and File Transfer Protocol (FTP).
Amazon S3 Access Points
According to AWS, Amazon S3 Access Points, a feature of S3, simplifies managing data access at scale for applications using shared data sets on S3. Announced in December 2019, Access points are unique hostnames that customers create to enforce distinct permissions and network controls for any request made through the access point. Amazon S3 Access Points can easily scale access for hundreds of applications by creating individualized access points with names and permissions customized for each application.
Access Points support AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) resource policies that allow you to control the use of the access point by resource, user, or other conditions. For an application or user to be able to access objects through an access point, both the access point and the underlying bucket must permit the request. Using an Access Point Policy, you can enable another account to access objects within an S3 bucket. The access point policy gives you fine-grain control over which users and which permissions, such as to GET and PUT objects, are allowed.
Below, we see an example of the SaaS vendor exposing an S3 Access Point. The customers use the supplied access points to exchange data between their account and their SaaS application. The interchange of data may be managed by the customer or by a vendor agent, deployed into the customer’s account.
Amazon API Gateway
According to AWS, Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. APIs act as the front door for applications to access data, business logic, or functionality from backend services. Using API Gateway, you can create RESTful APIs and WebSocket APIs that enable real-time two-way communication applications. API Gateway supports containerized and serverless workloads, as well as web applications.
Announced in July 2015, Amazon API Gateway and the accompanying APIs serve as a scalable, reliable, performant, and secure connections to backend resources in either the customer or SaaS vendor’s account. API Gateway backend resources include Lambda functions, HTTP endpoints, VPC Links, and other AWS services. Those AWS services include Amazon SQS and Kinesis. These services are often used to exchange data between a SaaS vendor’s account and their customer’s accounts. Eric Johnson of AWS gave a great presentation on API Gateway, available on YouTube, AWS re:Invent 2019: I didn’t know Amazon API Gateway did that.
Several security features can be used to secure communications between the vendor and the customer accounts when using the API Gateway. Security features include encrypting transmitted data using SSL/TLS Certificates (HTTPS), AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) integration, Client Certificates to ensure HTTP requests to your back-end services are originating from the API Gateway, Authorization using Amazon Cognito User Pools or a Lambda function, API Keys, and VPC Links.
Below, we see an example of the SaaS vendor exposing an API, backed by an SQS queue. The customers use the API to programmatically exchange data between their account and their SaaS application. The interchange of data may be managed by the customer or by a vendor agent, deployed into the customer’s account.
VPC Peering
According to AWS, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) enables customers to launch AWS resources into a virtual network that they have defined. A VPC peering connection is a networking connection between two VPCs that allows you to route traffic between them using private IPv4 addresses or IPv6 addresses. You can create a VPC peering connection between your VPCs, or with a VPC in another AWS account. As announced in November 2018, VPCs can be in different regions (known as inter-region VPC peering).
Below, we see an example of the SaaS vendor and the customer using VPC peering to enable direct interaction between a customer’s application, within their account, and their SaaS application, in the vendor’s account.
One of the limitations of VPC peering, which might impact its ability to scale for SaaS vendors using multi-tenant architectures, is overlapping CIDR blocks. According to AWS, you cannot create a VPC peering connection between VPCs with matching or overlapping IPv4 CIDR blocks. Given tens or hundreds of customers, VPC peering presents challenges in managing individual CIDR blocks when using a multi-tenant SaaS architectural approach.
VPC Endpoints
According to AWS, a VPC endpoint enables you to privately connect your VPC to supported AWS services and VPC endpoint services powered by AWS PrivateLink without requiring an Internet Gateway, NAT device, VPN connection, or AWS Direct Connect connection. Instances in your VPC do not require public IP addresses to communicate with resources in the service. Traffic between your VPC and the other service does not leave the Amazon network.
There are two types of VPC endpoints. An interface endpoint, Powered by AWS PrivateLink, is an elastic network interface (ENI) with a private IP address from the IP address range of your subnet that serves as an entry point for traffic destined to a supported service. Interface endpoints support a large and growing list of AWS services. The second type of VPC endpoint, a gateway endpoint, is a gateway that you specify as a target for a route in your route table for traffic destined to a supported AWS service. Both Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB are currently supported by gateway endpoints.
AWS PrivateLink
According to AWS, AWS PrivateLink simplifies the security of data shared with cloud-based applications by eliminating the exposure of data to the public Internet. AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity between VPCs, AWS services, and on-premises applications, securely on the AWS network. AWS PrivateLink makes it easy to connect services across different accounts and VPCs to simplify the network architecture significantly. James Devine of AWS delivered a great presentation on PrivateLink, available on YouTube, AWS re:Invent 2018: Best Practices for AWS PrivateLink.
AWS Service Endpoints
AWS Service Endpoints will direct the traffic to AWS services over AWS PrivateLink while keeping the network traffic within the AWS network. AWS PrivateLink enables SaaS providers to offer services that will look and feel like they are hosted directly on a private network. These services are securely accessible both from the cloud and from on-premises via AWS Direct Connect and AWS VPN, in a highly available and scalable manner.
Below, we see an example of routing API calls from the customer’s account to the SaaS vendor’s account, using an interface VPC endpoint (interface endpoint) powered by AWS PrivateLink. The customer’s requests are sent through ENIs in each private subnet to a Network Load Balancer (NLB) within the vendor’s account, using PrivateLink. There is no need for an Internet Gateway to route traffic over the public Internet.
Below, we see an example of near real-time routing messages from an application within the customer’s account to an Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream in the SaaS vendor’s account, using an interface endpoint powered by AWS PrivateLink. Again, there is no need for an Internet Gateway to route traffic over the public Internet. The interchange of data may be managed by the customer or by a vendor agent, deployed into the customer’s account.
Amazon EventBridge
According to AWS, Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus that makes it easy to connect applications using data from your applications, integrated SaaS applications, and AWS services. EventBridge delivers a stream of real-time data from event sources and routes that data to targets like AWS Lambda. You can set up routing rules to determine where to send your data to build application architectures that react in real-time to all of your data sources. EventBridge makes it easy to build event-driven applications because it takes care of event ingestion and delivery, security, authorization, and error handling for you. Mike Deck of AWS gave an excellent presentation on EventBridge, available on YouTube, AWS re:Invent 2019: Building event-driven architectures w/ Amazon EventBridge.
Amazon EventBridge SaaS Integrations
Amazon EventBridge ingests data from supported SaaS partners and routes it to AWS service targets. With EventBridge, you can use data from your SaaS applications to trigger workflows for customer support, business operations, and more. Currently supported SaaS partners include Auth0, Datadog, Epsagon, MongoDB, New Relic, and PagerDuty, amongst others.
Below, we see an example of routing custom events from the SaaS vendor’s account to multiple targets within the customer’s account using Amazon EventBridge. We can also use interface endpoints powered by AWS PrivateLink within both accounts to eliminate the need to send data over the public Internet. Traffic to targets of EventBridge also remains on the AWS global infrastructure.
JDBC and ODBC Database Connections
Lastly, for data sources on AWS, interactions between vendor and customer AWS Accounts can also be made using JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) and ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) database connections. Services such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, Amazon RDS, and Amazon Aurora can all be accessed using one or both of these two methods. There multiple ways to enhance the security of the connections, including SSL/TLS connections, data encryption at rest and in flight, AWS IAM service-linked roles, VPCs, and VPC peering.
Below, we see an example of the application in the SaaS vendor’s account communicating over JDBC, with a private Amazon RDS instance in the customer’s account. We can communicate between private subnets, within two different accounts using VPC peering. Like PrivateLink, traffic stays on the global AWS backbone, and never traverses the public Internet.
Conclusion
In this post, we examined several AWS services that help a SaaS vendor interact with their customer’s accounts. In future posts, we will take a more in-depth look at the advantages and disadvantages of each service with respect to their scalability and a vendor’s tenant isolation strategy.
This blog represents my own viewpoints and not of my employer, Amazon Web Services.
Architecting a Successful SaaS: Understanding Cloud-based SaaS Models
Posted by Gary A. Stafford in AWS, Cloud, Technology Consulting on May 15, 2020
Originally published on the AWS APN Blog.
Introduction
You’re a startup with an idea for a revolutionary new software product. You quickly build a beta version and deploy it to the cloud. After a successful social-marketing campaign and concerted sales effort, dozens of customers subscribe to your SaaS-based product. You’re ecstatic…until you realize you never architected your product for this level of success. You were so busy coding, raising capital, marketing, and selling, you never planned how you would scale your Sass product. How you would ensure your customer’s security, as well as your own. How you would meet the product reliability, compliance, and performance you promised. And, how you would monitor and meter your customer’s usage, no matter how fast you or they grew.
I’ve often heard budding entrepreneurs jest, if only success was their biggest problem. Certainly, success won’t be their biggest problem. For many, the problems come afterward, when they disappoint their customers by failing to deliver the quality product they promised. Or worse, damaging their customer’s reputation (and their own) by losing or exposing sensitive data. As the old saying goes, ‘you never get a second chance to make a first impression.’ Customer trust is hard-earned and easily lost. Properly architecting a scalable and secure SaaS-based product is just as important as feature development and sales. No one wants to fail on Day 1—you worked too hard to get there.
Architecting a Successful SaaS
In this series of posts, Architecting a Successful SaaS, we will explore how to properly plan and architect a SaaS product offering, designed for hosting on the cloud. We will start by answering basic questions, like, what is SaaS, what are the alternatives to SaaS for software distribution, and what are the most common SaaS product models. We will then examine different high-level SaaS architectures, review tenant isolation strategies, and explore how SaaS vendors securely interact with their customer’s cloud accounts. Finally, we will discuss how SaaS providers can meet established best practices, like those from AWS SaaS Factory and the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
For this post, I have chosen many examples of cloud services from AWS and vendors from AWS Marketplace. However, the principals discussed may be applied to other leading cloud providers, SaaS products, and cloud-based software marketplaces. All information in this post is publicly available.
What is SaaS?
According to AWS Marketplace, ‘SaaS [Software as a Service] is a delivery model for software applications whereby the vendor hosts and operates the application over the Internet. Customers pay for using the software without owning the underlying infrastructure.’ Another definition from AWS, ‘SaaS is a licensing and delivery model whereby software is centrally managed and hosted by a provider and available to customers on a subscription basis.’
A SaaS product, like other forms of software, is produced by what is commonly referred to as an Independent Software Vendor (ISV). According to Wikipedia, an Independent Software Vendor ‘is an organization specializing in making and selling software, as opposed to hardware, designed for mass or niche markets. This is in contrast to in-house software, which is developed by the organization that will use it, or custom software, which is designed or adapted for a single, specific third party. Although ISV-provided software is consumed by end-users, it remains the property of the vendor.’
Although estimates vary greatly, according to The Software as a Service (SaaS) Global Market Report 2020, the global SaaS market was valued at about $134.44B in 2018 and is expected to grow to $220.21B at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.1% through 2022. Statista predicts SaaS revenues will grow even faster, forecasting revenues of $266B by 2022, with continued strong positive growth to $346B by 2027.
Cloud-based Usage Models
Let’s start by reviewing the three most common ways that individuals, businesses, academic institutions, the public sector, and government consume services from cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and IBM Cloud (now includes Red Hat).
Indirect Consumer
Indirect consumers are customers who consume cloud-based SaaS products. Indirect users are often unlikely to know which cloud provider host’s the SaaS products to which they subscribe. Many SaaS products can import and export data, as well as integrate with other SaaS products. Many successful companies run their entire business in the cloud using a combination of SaaS products from multiple vendors.
Examples
- An advertising firm that uses Google G Suite for day-to-day communications and collaboration between its employees and clients.
- A large automotive parts manufacturer that runs its business using the Workday cloud-based Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) suite.
- A software security company that uses Zendesk for customer support. They also use the Slack integration for Zendesk to view, create, and take action on support tickets, using Slack channels.
- A recruiting firm that uses Zoom Meetings & Chat to interview remote candidates. They also use the Zoom integration with Lever recruiting software, to schedule interviews.
Direct Consumer
Direct consumers are customers who use cloud-based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) services to build and run their software; the DIY (do it yourself) model. The software deployed in the customer’s account may be created by the customer or purchased from a third-party software vendor and deployed within the customer’s cloud account. Direct users may purchase IaaS and PaaS services from multiple cloud providers.
Examples
- An advanced hobbyist that uses AWS IoT Core and Amazon QuickSight as part of a custom Smart Home automation application.
- A private equity firm that maintains its own proprietary AI-based investment recommendation engine using a combination of cloud-based services, like AWS Lambda and Amazon SageMaker.
- A mobile payment company that uses Amazon EKS and Amazon DynamoDB to run its own high-volume credit card processing application. To help ensure PCI compliance, they also use Aqua’s customer-deployed product, Aqua Cloud Native Security Platform for EKS (BYOL).
Hybrid Consumers
Hybrid consumers are customers who use a combination of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services. Customers often connect multiple IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services as part of larger enterprise software application platforms.
Examples
- A payroll company that hosts its proprietary payroll software product, using IaaS products like Amazon EC2 and Elastic Load Balancing. In addition, they use an integrated SaaS-based fraud detection product, like Cequence Security CQ botDefense, to ensure the safety and security of payroll customers.
- An online gaming company that operates its applications using the fully-managed container-based PaaS service, Amazon ECS. To promote their gaming products, they use a SaaS-based marketing product, like Mailchimp Marketing CRM.
Cloud-based Software
Most cloud-based software is sold in one of two ways, Customer-deployed or SaaS. Below, we see a breakdown by the method of product delivery on AWS Marketplace. All items in the chart, except SaaS, represent Customer-deployed products. Serverless applications are available elsewhere on AWS and are not represented in the AWS Marketplace statistics.
Customer-deployed
An ISV who sells customer-deployed software products to consumers of cloud-based IaaS and PaaS services. Products are installed by the customer, Systems Integrator (SI), or the ISV into the customer’s cloud account. Customer-deployed products are reminiscent of traditional ‘boxed’ software.
Customers typically pay a reoccurring hourly, monthly, or annual subscription fee for the software product, commonly referred to as pay-as-you-go (PAYG). The subscription fee paid to the vendor is in addition to the fees charged to the customer by the cloud service provider for the underlying compute resources on which the customer-deployed product runs in the customer’s cloud account.
Some customer-deployed products may also require a software license. Software licenses are often purchased separately through other channels. Applying a license you already own to a newly purchased product is commonly referred to as bring your own license (BYOL). BYOL is common in larger enterprise customers, who may have entered into an Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) with the ISV.
Customer-deployed cloud-based software products can take a variety of forms. The most common deliverables include some combination of virtual machines (VMs) such as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), Docker images, Amazon SageMaker models, or Infrastructure as Code such as AWS CloudFormation, HashiCorp Terraform, or Helm Charts. Customers usually pull these deliverables from a vendor’s AWS account or other public or private source code or binary repositories. Below, we see the breakdown of customer-deployed products, by the method of delivery, on AWS Marketplace.
Although historically, AMIs have been the predominant method of customer-deployed software delivery, newer technologies, such as Docker images, serverless, SageMaker models, and AWS Data Exchange datasets will continue to grow in this segment. The AWS Serverless Application Repository (SAR), currently contains over 500 serverless applications, not reflected in this chart. AWS appears to be moving toward making it easier to sell serverless software applications in AWS Marketplace, according to one recent post.
Customer-deployed cloud-based software products may require a connection between the installed product and the ISV for product support, license verification, product upgrades, or security notifications.
Examples
- Fortinet provides high-performance, integrated network security solutions for global enterprise businesses. Fortinet sells its customer-deployed AMI-based product, Fortinet FortiGate (BYOL) Next-Generation Firewall, on AWS Marketplace.
- Alluxio is a leader in data orchestration for big data and AI and ML workloads. Alluxio sells its customer-deployed AMI-based product, Alluxio Enterprise Edition – Caching for Data Analytics, on AWS Marketplace.
- Kasten provides cloud-native data management for Amazon EKS (Managed Kubernetes Service). Kasten offers their customer-deployed container-based product for backup and restore, disaster recovery, and mobility of Kubernetes applications, Kasten K10, on AWS Marketplace.
- Deep Vision AI specializes in visual recognition technology for images and videos. Deep Vision offers several API products, including the Deep Vision context recognition API, Deep Vision brand recognition API, and Deep Vision face recognition API, all sold on the AWS Marketplace. The APIs work with Amazon SageMaker, and are priced on an hourly rate for realtime inference and batch transforms. Customer-deployed products, designed for Amazon SageMaker, are a growing category on AWS Marketplace.
SaaS
An ISV who sells SaaS software products to customers. The SaaS product is deployed, managed, and sold by the ISV and hosted by a cloud provider, such as AWS. A SaaS product may or may not interact with a customer’s cloud account. SaaS products are similar to customer-deployed products with respect to their subscription-based fee structure. Subscriptions may be based on a unit of measure, often a period of time. Subscriptions may also be based on the number of users, requests, hosts, or the volume of data.
A significant difference between SaaS products and customer-deployed products is the lack of direct customer costs from the underlying cloud provider. The underlying costs are bundled into the subscription fee for the SaaS product.
Similar to Customer-deployed products, SaaS products target both consumers and businesses. SaaS products span a wide variety of consumer, business, industry-specific, and technical categories. AWS Marketplace offers products from vendors covering eight major categories and over 70 sub-categories.
SaaS Product Variants
I regularly work with a wide variety of cloud-based software vendors. In my experience, most cloud-based SaaS products fit into one of four categories, based on the primary way a customer interacts with the SaaS product:
- Stand-alone: A SaaS product that has no interaction with the customer’s cloud account;
- Data Access: A SaaS product that connects to the customer’s cloud account to only obtain data;
- Augmentation: A SaaS product that connects to the customer’s cloud account, interacting with and augmenting the customer’s software;
- Discrete Service: A variation of augmentation, a SaaS product that provides a discrete service or function as opposed to a more complete software product;
Stand-alone
A stand-alone SaaS product has no interaction with a customer’s cloud account. Customers of stand-alone SaaS products interact with the product through an interface provided by the SaaS vendor. Many stand-alone SaaS products can import and export customer data, as well as integrate with other cloud-based SaaS products. Stand-alone SaaS products may target consumers, known as Business-to-Consumer (B2C SaaS). They may also target businesses, known as Business-to-Business (B2B SaaS).
Examples
- A Cloud Guru, the leading online cloud training platform, sells its A Cloud Guru AWS Training & Certification SaaS product on AWS Marketplace.
- Hubspot is a leading provider of marketing, sales, and service B2B SaaS products for businesses. Hubspot, which is hosted on AWS in the US, offers its Marketing Hub All-in-One Inbound Marketing Software, through their website.
- Trello is another example of a B2B SaaS product. Trello, whose Trello product is hosted on AWS, enables users to organize and prioritize their projects.
Data Access
A SaaS product that connects to a customer’s data sources in their cloud account or on-prem. These SaaS products often fall into the categories of Big Data and Data Analytics, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, and IoT (Internet of Things). Products in these categories work with large quantities of data. Given the sheer quantity of data or real-time nature of the data, importing or manually inputting data directly into the SaaS product, through the SaaS vendor’s user interface is unrealistic. Often, these SaaS products will cache some portion of the customer’s data to reduce customer’s data transfer costs.
Similar to the previous stand-alone SaaS products, customers of these SaaS products interact with the product thought a user interface provided by the SaaS vendor.
Examples
- Zepl provides an enterprise data science analytics platform, which enables data exploration, analysis, and collaboration. Zepl sells its Zepl Science and Analytics Platform SaaS product on AWS Marketplace. The Zepl product provides integration to many types of customer data sources including Snowflake, Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, Google BigQuery, Apache Cassandra (Amazon MCS), and other SQL databases.
- Sisense provides an enterprise-grade, cloud-native business intelligence and analytics platform, powered by AI. Sisense offers its Sisense Business Intelligence SaaS product on AWS Marketplace. This product lets customers prepare and analyze disparate big datasets using Sisense’s Data Connectors. The wide array of connectors provide connectivity to dozens of different cloud-based and on-prem data sources.
- Databricks provides a unified data analytics platform, designed for massive-scale data engineering and collaborative data science. Databricks offers its Databricks Unified Analytics Platform SaaS product on AWS Marketplace. Databricks allows customers to interact with data across many different data sources, data storage types, and data types, including batch and streaming.
- DataRobot provides an enterprise AI platform, which enables global enterprises to collaboratively harness the power of AI. DataRobot sells its DataRobot Automated Machine Learning for AWS SaaS product on AWS Marketplace. Using connectors, like Skyvia’s OData connector, customers can connect their data sources to the DataRobot product.
Augmentation
A SaaS product that interacts with, or augments a customer’s application, which is managed by the customer in their own cloud account. These SaaS products often maintain secure, loosely-coupled, unidirectional or bidirectional connections between the vendor’s SaaS product and the customer’s account. Vendors on AWS often use services like Amazon EventBridge, AWS PrivateLink, VPC Peering, Amazon S3, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon SQS, and Amazon SNS to interact with customer’s accounts and exchange data. Often, these SaaS products fall within the categories of Security, Logging and Monitoring, and DevOps.
Customers of these types of SaaS products generally interact with their own software, as well as the SaaS product thought an interface provided by the SaaS vendor.
Examples
- CloudCheckr provides solutions that enable clients to optimize costs, security, and compliance on leading cloud providers. CloudCheckr sells its Cloud Management Platform SaaS product on AWS Marketplace. CloudCheckr uses an AWS IAM cross-account role and Amazon S3 to exchange data between the customer’s account and their SaaS product.
- Splunk provides the leading software platform for real-time Operational Intelligence. Splunk sells its Splunk Cloud SaaS product on AWS Marketplace. Splunk Cloud enables rapid application troubleshooting, ensures security and compliance, and provides monitoring of business-critical services in real-time. According to their documentation, Splunk uses a combination of AWS S3, Amazon SQS, and Amazon SNS services to transfer AWS CloudTrail logs from the customer’s accounts to Splunk Cloud.
Discrete Service
Discrete SaaS products are a variation of SaaS augmentation products. Discrete SaaS products provide specific, distinct functionality to a customer’s software application. These products may be an API, data source, or machine learning model, which is often accessed completely through a vendor’s API. The products have a limited or no visual user interface. These SaaS products are sometimes referred to as a ‘Service as a Service’. Discrete SaaS products often fall into the categories of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Financial Services, Reference Data, and Authentication and Authorization.
Examples
- Twinword provides a variety of text analysis APIs, including the Sentiment Analysis API, Text Similarity API, Emotion Analysis API, and Text Classification API, all sold on the AWS Marketplace. The APIs are priced, based on the number of requests per month.
- Sensifai offers a comprehensive video recognition system that can be used to tag videos and pictures. Sensifai offers several SaaS-based APIs, including Automatic Video Recognition, Automatic Audio or Sound Classification, and Action Recognition (Trainable Algorithm), all sold on the AWS Marketplace.
AWS Data Exchange
There is a new category of products on AWS Marketplace. Released in November 2019, AWS Data Exchange makes it easy to find, subscribe to, and use third-party data in the cloud. According to AWS, Data Exchange vendors can publish new data, as well as automatically publish revisions to existing data and notify subscribers. Once subscribed to a data product, customers can use the AWS Data Exchange API to load data into Amazon S3 and then analyze it with a wide variety of AWS analytics and machine learning services.
Data Exchange seems to best fit the description of a customer-deployed product. However, given the nature of the vendor-subscriber relationship, where data may be regularly exchanged—revised and published by the vendor and pulled by the subscriber—I would consider Data Exchange a cloud-based hybrid product.
AWS Data Exchange products are available on AWS Marketplace. The list of qualified data providers is growing and includes Reuters, Foursquare, TransUnion, Pitney Bowes, IMDb, Epsilon, ADP, Dun & Bradstreet, and others. As illustrated below, data sets are available in the categories of financial services, public sector, healthcare, media, telecommunications, and more.
Examples
- Dun & Bradstreet currently offers over 30 data products on AWS Marketplace, delivered using AWS Data Exchange. Products include Direct Marketing Services – First Research Industry Profile, Insurance Agencies & Brokerages – First Research Industry Profile, and Department Stores (US) – Industry Marketing File. Dun & Bradstreet’s datasets are priced, based on a 12-month subscription.
- Reuters currently has nine data products on AWS Marketplace, delivered using AWS Data Exchange. Products include Reuters News Archive: Automotive (1 Year), Reuters News Archive: Pharmaceutical (1 Year), and Reuters News Archive: Energy (1 Year).
- SafeGraph offers accurate Points-of-Interest (POI) data, business listings, and store visitor insights data for commercial places in the United States. SafeGraph currently offers 23 different products on AWS Marketplace, delivered using AWS Data Exchange, including SafeGraph Core Places – Restaurants, SafeGraph Core Places – Entire US, and SafeGraph Foot Traffic Patterns (2019) – Car Dealerships.
Conclusion
In this first post, we’ve become familiar with the common ways in which customers consume cloud-based IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS products and services. We also explored the different ways in which ISVs sell their software products to customers. In future posts, we will examine different high-level SaaS architectures, review tenant isolation strategies, and explore how SaaS vendors securely interact with their customer’s cloud accounts. Finally, we will discuss how SaaS providers can meet best-practices, like those from AWS SaaS Factory and the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
References
Here are some great references to learn more about building and managing SaaS products on AWS.
- SaaS on AWS
- SaaS Success Stories
- AWS SaaS Factory
- Simplify SaaS Procurement with AWS Marketplace
- AWS Marketplace: Software-as-a-Service–Based Products
This blog represents my own view points and not of my employer, Amazon Web Services.
Using Amazon Polly Text-to-Speech Service to Expand your Blog’s Audience
Posted by Gary A. Stafford in Software Development on March 25, 2020
Introduction
Writing a blog about your latest product’s features? Case studies on your latest’s customer integrations? Opinions and insights into your industry, or your customer’s industries? Well written blog posts not only inform, they can also showcase you or your organization’s experience and expertise. However, if you blog on a regular basis, you know there is a lot of content out there to steal a reader’s interest. Your audience’s interest in your post can be short-lived.
A great way to extend the reach of your posts and maintain interest longer is to produce an audio version. Audio versions can be included along with the written post. Audio versions may also be shared separately on popular services such as YouTube and SoundCloud. Many multi-tasking readers may prefer to listen to a post as opposed to reading. I often listen while commuting, working out, or running.
Amazon Polly’s text-to-speech (TTS) capabilities make it easy to convert a written post to a lifelike, professionally-sounding audio version. In this brief post, we will learn how to use Amazon Polly to convert blog posts to audio.
Preparing Post for Audio
Most posts only require minor modifications to optimize them for conversion to audio.
- Adding an opening statement to your post, like ‘Audio version of the post’, followed by the post’s title, provides a good way to start the audio. For example, ‘Audio Introduction to: Getting Started with Data Analytics using Jupyter Notebooks, PySpark, and Docker’.
- If your post includes code, you probably want to exclude those sections. If the post contains a large amount of code, you might consider only creating an audio introduction to the post.
- If your post contains graphs or charts, which are referenced in the post, I suggest adding text, such as ‘See the Chart’, along with the caption of the graph or chart. For example, ‘See the Chart – AWS Marketplace: Product Delivery Methods (February 2020)’.
- Create a simple URL for your post and add it to the audio, either at the beginning or end of the post. For example, ‘To read the full version of this post, including code samples, please go to tiny url dot com forward slash streaming warehouse’.
Custom Lexicons
Amazon Polly offers the ability to use custom lexicons, or vocabularies. According to AWS, you can modify the pronunciation of particular words, such as company names, acronyms, foreign words, and neologisms. If you write industry-specific or highly technical blogs, you will find creating a lexicon is probably necessary to ensure your accompanying audio sounds accurate. In my own technical posts, I most often use a custom lexicon file for acronyms and company names. While many acronyms are spelled out, others are not and have unique pronunciations. Likewise, many company names have a unique pronunciation.
Take for example the following acronyms, which I used in my last few posts: PaaS, BYOL, ELA, PAYG, IPv4, IPv6, IAM, ENI. Using the default lexicon of Amazon Polly, we end up with incorrect pronunciations for all of these acronyms.
Now listen to the pronunciation of the same acronyms, after we apply a custom lexicon.
Lexicons must conform to the Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS) W3C recommendation. The lexicon files are in XML format. Below is a snippet of a sample lexicon files.
Amazon Polly Console
Amazon Polly supports synthesizing speech from either plain text or SSML input. From the Amazon Polly’s Management Console, copy and paste your post’s prepared text into the ‘Plain text’ tab.
Next, choose the Voice Engine. If you are using English, I suggest ‘Neural’. According to AWS, Amazon Polly has a Neural TTS (NTTS) system that can produce even higher quality voices than its standard voices. The NTTS system produces the most natural and human-like text-to-speech voices possible.
Choose your Language and Region. Then, select your Voice; I prefer ‘Joanna’. In my opinion, her voice has a natural, lifelike sound. If you prefer a male voice, ‘Matthew’ is quite natural sounding. Lastly, upload your lexicon file(s).
To start the process, choose ‘Synthesize to S3’. Indicate the S3 bucket you would like the mp3 format audio file, output into. You can also add a prefix to the mp3 files. For most average length posts, the text synthesis process takes less than one minute. To be notified, you can include an Amazon SNS topic ARN. Select ‘Synthesize’.
Polly creates a synthesis task.
The synthesis tasks may be viewed from the ‘S3 synthesis tasks’ tab.
Once the synthesis task is complete, the resulting mp3 audio file may be viewed and downloaded from the S3 Management Console. If you are using a Mac, QuickTime Player works great to review the audio file.
AWS CLI and SDK
Amazon Polly may also be used from the AWS CLI or using the AWS SDK. In the example below, we have replicated the same operations performed in the Console, this time using the AWS CLI. First, upload your lexicon file using the polly put-lexicon command. Then call the polly start-speech-synthesis-task command to create a synthesis task.
The output should look similar to the screengrab, below. The results will be identical to using the Console.
You can check the task’s results using the polly list-speech-synthesis-tasks command.
Conclusion
In this brief post, we saw a great use case for Amazon Polly, converting your written blog posts into audio. Creating audio versions of our blogs is a great way to extend the reach of the post to a potentially new audience and maintain your current audience’s interest a little longer. Amazon Polly has several other features and capabilities to explore.
This blog represents my own view points and not of my employer, Amazon Web Services.
Streaming Data Analytics with Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, Redshift, and QuickSight
Posted by Gary A. Stafford in AWS, Cloud, Python, Software Development, SQL on March 5, 2020
Introduction
Databases are ideal for storing and organizing data that requires a high volume of transaction-oriented query processing while maintaining data integrity. In contrast, data warehouses are designed for performing data analytics on vast amounts of data from one or more disparate sources. In our fast-paced, hyper-connected world, those sources often take the form of continuous streams of web application logs, e-commerce transactions, social media feeds, online gaming activities, financial trading transactions, and IoT sensor readings. Streaming data must be analyzed in near real-time, while often first requiring cleansing, transformation, and enrichment.
In the following post, we will demonstrate the use of Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon QuickSight to analyze streaming data. We will simulate time-series data, streaming from a set of IoT sensors to Kinesis Data Firehose. Kinesis Data Firehose will write the IoT data to an Amazon S3 Data Lake, where it will then be copied to Redshift in near real-time. In Amazon Redshift, we will enhance the streaming sensor data with data contained in the Redshift data warehouse, which has been gathered and denormalized into a star schema.
In Redshift, we can analyze the data, asking questions like, what is the min, max, mean, and median temperature over a given time period at each sensor location. Finally, we will use Amazon Quicksight to visualize the Redshift data using rich interactive charts and graphs, including displaying geospatial sensor data.
Featured Technologies
The following AWS services are discussed in this post.
Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose
According to Amazon, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose can capture, transform, and load streaming data into data lakes, data stores, and analytics tools. Direct Kinesis Data Firehose integrations include Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, and Splunk. Kinesis Data Firehose enables near real-time analytics with existing business intelligence (BI) tools and dashboards.
Amazon Redshift
According to Amazon, Amazon Redshift is the most popular and fastest cloud data warehouse. With Redshift, users can query petabytes of structured and semi-structured data across your data warehouse and data lake using standard SQL. Redshift allows users to query and export data to and from data lakes. Redshift can federate queries of live data from Redshift, as well as across one or more relational databases.
Amazon Redshift Spectrum
According to Amazon, Amazon Redshift Spectrum can efficiently query and retrieve structured and semistructured data from files in Amazon S3 without having to load the data into Amazon Redshift tables. Redshift Spectrum tables are created by defining the structure for data files and registering them as tables in an external data catalog. The external data catalog can be AWS Glue or an Apache Hive metastore. While Redshift Spectrum is an alternative to copying the data into Redshift for analysis, we will not be using Redshift Spectrum in this post.
Amazon QuickSight
According to Amazon, Amazon QuickSight is a fully managed business intelligence service that makes it easy to deliver insights to everyone in an organization. QuickSight lets users easily create and publish rich, interactive dashboards that include Amazon QuickSight ML Insights. Dashboards can then be accessed from any device and embedded into applications, portals, and websites.
What is a Data Warehouse?
According to Amazon, a data warehouse is a central repository of information that can be analyzed to make better-informed decisions. Data flows into a data warehouse from transactional systems, relational databases, and other sources, typically on a regular cadence. Business analysts, data scientists, and decision-makers access the data through business intelligence tools, SQL clients, and other analytics applications.
Demonstration
Source Code
All the source code for this post can be found on GitHub. Use the following command to git clone a local copy of the project.
CloudFormation
Use the two AWS CloudFormation templates, included in the project, to build two CloudFormation stacks. Please review the two templates and understand the costs of the resources before continuing.
The first CloudFormation template, redshift.yml, provisions a new Amazon VPC with associated network and security resources, a single-node Redshift cluster, and two S3 buckets.
The second CloudFormation template, kinesis-firehose.yml, provisions an Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream, associated IAM Policy and Role, and an Amazon CloudWatch log group and two log streams.
Change the REDSHIFT_PASSWORD value to ensure your security. Optionally, change the REDSHIFT_USERNAME value. Make sure that the first stack completes successfully, before creating the second stack.
Review AWS Resources
To confirm all the AWS resources were created correctly, use the AWS Management Console.
Kinesis Data Firehose
In the Amazon Kinesis Dashboard, you should see the new Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream, redshift-delivery-stream.
The Details tab of the new Amazon Kinesis Firehose delivery stream should look similar to the following. Note the IAM Role, FirehoseDeliveryRole, which was created and associated with the delivery stream by CloudFormation.
We are not performing any transformations of the incoming messages. Note the new S3 bucket that was created and associated with the stream by CloudFormation. The bucket name was randomly generated. This bucket is where the incoming messages will be written.
Note the buffer conditions of 1 MB and 60 seconds. Whenever the buffer of incoming messages is greater than 1 MB or the time exceeds 60 seconds, the messages are written in JSON format, using GZIP compression, to S3. These are the minimal buffer conditions, and as close to real-time streaming to Redshift as we can get.
Note the COPY command, which is used to copy the messages from S3 to the message table in Amazon Redshift. Kinesis uses the IAM Role, ClusterPermissionsRole, created by CloudFormation, for credentials. We are using a Manifest to copy the data to Redshift from S3. According to Amazon, a Manifest ensures that the COPY command loads all of the required files, and only the required files, for a data load. The Manifests are automatically generated and managed by the Kinesis Firehose delivery stream.
Redshift Cluster
In the Amazon Redshift Console, you should see a new single-node Redshift cluster consisting of one Redshift dc2.large Dense Compute node type.
Note the new VPC, Subnet, and VPC Security Group created by CloudFormation. Also, observe that the Redshift cluster is publically accessible from outside the new VPC.
Redshift Ingress Rules
The single-node Redshift cluster is assigned to an AWS Availability Zone in the US East (N. Virginia) us-east-1 AWS Region. The cluster is associated with a VPC Security Group. The Security Group contains three inbound rules, all for Redshift port 5439. The IP addresses associated with the three inbound rules provide access to the following: 1) a /27 CIDR block for Amazon QuickSight in us-east-1, a /27 CIDR block for Amazon Kinesis Firehose in us-east-1, and to you, a /32 CIDR block with your current IP address. If your IP address changes or you do not use the us-east-1 Region, you will need to change one or all of these IP addresses. The list of Kinesis Firehose IP addresses is here. The list of QuickSight IP addresses is here.
If you cannot connect to Redshift from your local SQL client, most often, your IP address has changed and is incorrect in the Security Group’s inbound rule.
Redshift SQL Client
You can choose to use the Redshift Query Editor to interact with Redshift or use a third-party SQL client for greater flexibility. To access the Redshift Query Editor, use the user credentials specified in the redshift.yml CloudFormation template.
There is a lot of useful functionality in the Redshift Console and within the Redshift Query Editor. However, a notable limitation of the Redshift Query Editor, in my opinion, is the inability to execute multiple SQL statements at the same time. Whereas, most SQL clients allow multiple SQL queries to be executed at the same time.
I prefer to use JetBrains PyCharm IDE. PyCharm has out-of-the-box integration with RedShift. Using PyCharm, I can edit the project’s Python, SQL, AWS CLI shell, and CloudFormation code, all from within PyCharm.
If you use any of the common SQL clients, you will need to set-up a JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) or ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) connection to Redshift. The ODBC and JDBC connection strings can be found in the Redshift cluster’s Properties tab or in the Outputs tab from the CloudFormation stack, redshift-stack.
You will also need the RedShift database username and password you included in the aws cloudformation create-stack AWS CLI command you executed previously. Below, we see PyCharm’s Project Data Sources window containing a new data source for the Redshift dev database.
Database Schema and Tables
When CloudFormation created the Redshift cluster, it also created a new database, dev. Using the Redshift Query Editor or your SQL client of choice, execute the following series of SQL commands to create a new database schema, sensor, and six tables in the sensor schema.
Star Schema
The tables represent denormalized data, taken from one or more relational database sources. The tables form a star schema. The star schema is widely used to develop data warehouses. The star schema consists of one or more fact tables referencing any number of dimension tables. The location, manufacturer, sensor, and history tables are dimension tables. The sensors table is a fact table.
In the diagram below, the foreign key relationships are virtual, not physical. The diagram was created using PyCharm’s schema visualization tool. Note the schema’s star shape. The message table is where the streaming IoT data will eventually be written. The message table is related to the sensors fact table through the common guid field.
Sample Data to S3
Next, copy the sample data, included in the project, to the S3 data bucket created with CloudFormation. Each CSV-formatted data file corresponds to one of the tables we previously created. Since the bucket name is semi-random, we can use the AWS CLI and jq to get the bucket name, then use it to perform the copy commands.
The output from the AWS CLI should look similar to the following.
Sample Data to RedShift
Whereas a relational database, such as Amazon RDS is designed for online transaction processing (OLTP), Amazon Redshift is designed for online analytic processing (OLAP) and business intelligence applications. To write data to Redshift we typically use the COPY command versus frequent, individual INSERT statements, as with OLTP, which would be prohibitively slow. According to Amazon, the Redshift COPY command leverages the Amazon Redshift massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture to read and load data in parallel from files on Amazon S3, from a DynamoDB table, or from text output from one or more remote hosts.
In the following series of SQL statements, replace the placeholder, your_bucket_name, in five places with your S3 data bucket name. The bucket name will start with the prefix, redshift-stack-databucket. The bucket name can be found in the Outputs tab of the CloudFormation stack, redshift-stack. Next, replace the placeholder, cluster_permissions_role_arn, with the ARN (Amazon Resource Name) of the ClusterPermissionsRole. The ARN is formatted as follows, arn:aws:iam::your-account-id:role/ClusterPermissionsRole. The ARN can be found in the Outputs tab of the CloudFormation stack, redshift-stack.
Using the Redshift Query Editor or your SQL client of choice, execute the SQL statements to copy the sample data from S3 to each of the corresponding tables in the Redshift dev database. The TRUNCATE commands guarantee there is no previous sample data present in the tables.
Database Views
Next, create four Redshift database Views. These views may be used to analyze the data in Redshift, and later, in Amazon QuickSight.
- sensor_msg_detail: Returns aggregated sensor details, using the
sensorsfact table and all five dimension tables in a SQL Join. - sensor_msg_count: Returns the number of messages received by Redshift, for each sensor.
- sensor_avg_temp: Returns the average temperature from each sensor, based on all the messages received from each sensor.
- sensor_avg_temp_current: View is identical for the previous view but limited to the last 30 minutes.
Using the Redshift Query Editor or your SQL client of choice, execute the following series of SQL statements.
At this point, you should have a total of six tables and four views in the sensor schema of the dev database in Redshift.
Test the System
With all the necessary AWS resources and Redshift database objects created and sample data in the Redshift database, we can test the system. The included Python script, kinesis_put_test_msg.py, will generate a single test message and send it to Kinesis Data Firehose. If everything is working, the message should be delivered from Kinesis Data Firehose to S3, then copied to Redshift, and appear in the message table.
Install the required Python packages and then execute the Python script.
Run the following SQL query to confirm the record is in the message table of the dev database. It will take at least one minute for the message to appear in Redshift.
Once the message is confirmed to be present in the message table, delete the record by truncating the table.
Streaming Data
Assuming the test message worked, we can proceed with simulating the streaming IoT sensor data. The included Python script, kinesis_put_streaming_data.py, creates six concurrent threads, representing six temperature sensors. The simulated data uses an algorithm that follows an oscillating sine wave or sinusoid, representing rising and falling temperatures. In the script, I have configured each thread to start with an arbitrary offset to add some randomness to the simulated data.
The variables within the script can be adjusted to shorten or lengthen the time it takes to stream the simulated data. By default, each of the six threads creates 400 messages per sensor, in one-minute increments. Including the offset start of each proceeding thread, the total runtime of the script is about 7.5 hours to generate 2,400 simulated IoT sensor temperature readings and push to Kinesis Data Firehose. Make sure you can guarantee you will maintain a connection to the Internet for the entire runtime of the script. I normally run the script in the background, from a small EC2 instance.
To use the Python script, execute either of the two following commands. Using the first command will run the script in the foreground. Using the second command will run the script in the background.
If you used the foreground command, you should see messages being generated by each thread and sent to Kinesis Data Firehose. Each message contains the GUID of the sensor, a timestamp, and a temperature reading.
The messages are sent to Kinesis Data Firehose, which in turn writes the messages to S3. The messages are written in JSON format using GZIP compression. Below, we see an example of the GZIP compressed JSON files in S3. The JSON files are partitioned by year, month, day, and hour.
Confirm Data Streaming to Redshift
From the Amazon Kinesis Firehose Console Metrics tab, you should see incoming messages flowing to S3 and on to Redshift.
Executing the following SQL query should show an increasing number of messages.
How Near Real-time?
Earlier, we saw how the Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream was configured to buffer data at the rate of 1 MB or 60 seconds. Whenever the buffer of incoming messages is greater than 1 MB or the time exceeds 60 seconds, the messages are written to S3. Each record in the message table has two timestamps. The first timestamp, ts, is when the temperature reading was recorded. The second timestamp, created, is when the message was written to Redshift, using the COPY command. We can calculate the delta in seconds between the two timestamps using the following SQL query in Redshift.
Using the results of the Redshift query, we can visualize the results in Amazon QuickSight. In my own tests, we see that for 2,400 messages, over approximately 7.5 hours, the minimum delay was 1 second, and a maximum delay was 64 seconds. Hence, near real-time, in this case, is about one minute or less, with an average latency of roughly 30 seconds.
Analyzing the Data with Redshift
I suggest waiting at least thirty minutes for a significant number of messages copied into Redshift. With the data streaming into Redshift, execute each of the database views we created earlier. You should see the streaming message data, joined to the existing static data in RedShift. As data continues to stream into Redshift, the views will display different results based on the current message table contents.
Here, we see the first ten results of the sensor_msg_detail view.
Next, we see the results of the sensor_avg_temp view.
Amazon QuickSight
In a recent post, Getting Started with Data Analysis on AWS using AWS Glue, Amazon Athena, and QuickSight: Part 2, I detailed getting started with Amazon QuickSight. In this post, I will assume you are familiar with QuickSight.
Amazon recently added a full set of aws quicksight APIs for interacting with QuickSight. Though, for this part of the demonstration, we will be working directly in the Amazon QuickSight Console, as opposed to the AWS CLI, AWS CDK, or CloudFormation.
Redshift Data Sets
To visualize the data from Amazon Redshift, we start by creating Data Sets in QuickSight. QuickSight supports a large number of data sources for creating data sets. We will use the Redshift data source. If you recall, we added an inbound rule for QuickSight, allowing us to connect to our Redshift cluster in us-east-1.
We will select the sensor schema, which is where the tables and views for this demonstration are located.
We can choose any of the tables or views in the Redshift dev database that we want to use for visualization.
Below, we see examples of two new data sets, shown in the QuickSight Data Prep Console. Note how QuickSight automatically recognizes field types, including dates, latitude, and longitude.
Visualizations
Using the data sets, QuickSight allows us to create a wide number of rich visualizations. Below, we see the simulated time-series data from the six temperature sensors.
Next, we see an example of QuickSight’s ability to show geospatial data. The Map shows the location of each sensor and the average temperature recorded by that sensor.
Cleaning Up
To remove the resources created for this post, use the following series of AWS CLI commands.
Conclusion
In this brief post, we have learned how streaming data can be analyzed in near real-time, in Amazon Redshift, using Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. Further, we explored how the results of those analyses can be visualized in Amazon QuickSight. For customers that depend on a data warehouse for data analytics, but who also have streaming data sources, the use of Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose or Amazon Redshift Spectrum is an excellent choice.
This blog represents my own viewpoints and not of my employer, Amazon Web Services.
Getting Started with Data Analysis on AWS using AWS Glue, Amazon Athena, and QuickSight: Part 2
Posted by Gary A. Stafford in AWS, Big Data, Cloud, Software Development, SQL on January 14, 2020
Introduction
In part one, we learned how to ingest, transform, and enrich raw, semi-structured data, in multiple formats, using Amazon S3, AWS Glue, Amazon Athena, and AWS Lambda. We built an S3-based data lake and learned how AWS leverages open-source technologies, including Presto, Apache Hive, and Apache Parquet. In part two of this post, we will use the transformed and enriched data sources, stored in the data lake, to create compelling visualizations using Amazon QuickSight.
High-level AWS architecture diagram of the demonstration.
Background
If you recall the demonstration from part one of the post, we had adopted the persona of a large, US-based electric energy provider. The energy provider had developed and sold its next-generation Smart Electrical Monitoring Hub (Smart Hub) to residential customers. Customers can analyze their electrical usage with a fine level of granularity, per device and over time. The goal of the Smart Hub is to enable the customers, using data, to reduce their electrical costs. The provider benefits from a reduction in load on the existing electrical grid and a better distribution of daily electrical load as customers shift usage to off-peak times to save money.
Data Visualization and BI
The data analysis process in the demonstration was divided into four logical stages: 1) Raw Data Ingestion, 2) Data Transformation, 3) Data Enrichment, and 4) Data Visualization and Business Intelligence (BI).
Full data analysis workflow diagram (click to enlarge…)
In the final, Data Visualization and Business Intelligence (BI) stage, the enriched data is presented and analyzed. There are many enterprise-grade services available for data visualization and business intelligence, which integrate with Amazon Athena. Amazon services include Amazon QuickSight, Amazon EMR, and Amazon SageMaker. Third-party solutions from AWS Partners, many available on the AWS Marketplace, include Tableau, Looker, Sisense, and Domo.
In this demonstration, we will focus on Amazon QuickSight. Amazon QuickSight is a fully managed business intelligence (BI) service. QuickSight lets you create and publish interactive dashboards that include ML Insights. Dashboards can be accessed from any device, and embedded into your applications, portals, and websites. QuickSight serverlessly scales automatically from tens of users to tens of thousands without any infrastructure management.
Using QuickSight
QuickSight APIs
Amazon recently added a full set of aws quicksight APIs for interacting with QuickSight. For example, to preview the three QuickSight data sets created for this part of the demo, with the AWS CLI, we would use the list-data-sets comand.
To examine details of a single data set, with the AWS CLI, we would use the describe-data-set command.
QuickSight Console
However, for this final part of the demonstration, we will be working from the Amazon QuickSight Console, as opposed to the AWS CLI, AWS CDK, or CloudFormation templates.
Signing Up for QuickSight
To use Amazon QuickSight, you must sign up for QuickSight.
There are two Editions of Amazon QuickSight, Standard and Enterprise. For this demonstration, the Standard Edition will suffice.
QuickSight Data Sets
Amazon QuickSight uses Data Sets as the basis for all data visualizations. According to AWS, QuickSight data sets can be created from a wide variety of data sources, including Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Athena, and Amazon S3. You can also upload Excel spreadsheets or flat files (CSV, TSV, CLF, ELF, and JSON), connect to on-premises databases like SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL and import data from SaaS applications like Salesforce. Below, we see a list of the latest data sources available in the QuickSight New Data Set Console.
Demonstration Data Sets
For the demonstration, I have created three QuickSight data sets, all based on Amazon Athena. You have two options when using Amazon Athena as a data source. The first option is to select a table from an AWS Glue Data Catalog database, such as the database we created in part one of the post, ‘smart_hub_data_catalog.’ The second option is to create a custom SQL query, based on one or more tables in an AWS Glue Data Catalog database.
Of the three data sets created for part two of this demonstration, two data sets use tables directly from the Data Catalog, including ‘etl_output_parquet’ and ‘electricity_rates_parquet.’ The third data set uses a custom SQL query, based on the single Data Catalog table, ‘smart_hub_locations_parquet.’ All three tables used to create the data sets represent the enriched, highly efficient Parquet-format data sources in the S3-based Data Lake.
Data Set Features
There are a large number of features available when creating and configuring data sets. We cannot possibly cover all of them in this post. Let’s look at three features: geospatial field types, calculated fields, and custom SQL.
Geospatial Data Types
QuickSight can intelligently detect common types of geographic fields in a data source and assign QuickSight geographic data type, including Country, County, City, Postcode, and State. QuickSight can also detect geospatial data, including Latitude and Longitude. We will take advantage of this QuickSight feature for our three data set’s data sources, including the State, Postcode, Latitude, and Longitude field types.
Calculated Fields
A commonly-used QuickSight data set feature is the ‘Calculated field.’ For the ‘etl_output_parquet’ data set, I have created a new field (column), cost_dollar.
The cost field is the electrical cost of the device, over a five minute time interval, in cents (¢). The calculated cost_dollar field is the quotient of the cost field divided by 100. This value represents the electrical cost of the device, over a five minute time interval, in dollars ($). This is a straightforward example. However, a calculated field can be very complex, built from multiple arithmetic, comparison, and conditional functions, string calculations, and data set fields.
Data set calculated fields can also be created and edited from the QuickSight Analysis Console (discussed later).
Custom SQL
The third QuickSight data set is based on an Amazon Athena custom SQL query.
Although you can write queries in the QuickSight Data Prep Console, I prefer to write custom Athena queries using the Athena Query Editor. Using the Editor, you can write, run, debug, and optimize queries to ensure they function correctly, first.
The Athena query can then be pasted into the Custom SQL window. Clicking ‘Finish’ in the window is the equivalent of ‘Run query’ in the Athena Query Editor Console. The query runs and returns data.
Similar to the Athena Query Editor, queries executed in the QuickSight Data Prep Console will show up in the Athena History tab, with a /* QuickSight */ comment prefix.
SPICE
You will notice the three QuickSight data sets are labeled, ‘SPICE.’ According to AWS, the acronym, SPICE, stands for ‘Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory, Calculation Engine.’ QuickSight’s in-memory calculation engine, SPICE, achieves blazing fast performance at scale. SPICE automatically replicates data for high availability allowing thousands of users to simultaneously perform fast, interactive analysis while shielding your underlying data infrastructure, saving you time and resources. With the Standard Edition of QuickSight, as the first Author, you get 1 GB of SPICE in-memory data for free.
QuickSight Analysis
The QuickSight Analysis Console is where Analyses are created. A specific QuickSight Analysis will contain a collection of data sets and data visualizations (visuals). Each visual is associated with a single data set.
Types of QuickSight Analysis visuals include: horizontal and vertical, single and stacked bar charts, line graphs, combination charts, area line charts, scatter plots, heat maps, pie and donut charts, tree maps, pivot tables, gauges, key performance indicators (KPI), geospatial diagrams, and word clouds. Individual visual titles, legends, axis, and other visual aspects can be easily modified. Visuals can contain drill-downs.
A data set’s fields can be modified from within the Analysis Console. Field types and formats, such as date, numeric, currency fields, can be customized for display. The Analysis can include a Title and subtitle. There are some customizable themes available to change the overall look of the Analysis.
Analysis Filters
Data displayed in the visuals can be further shaped using a combination of Filters, Conditional formatting, and Parameters. Below, we see an example of a typical filter based on a range of dates and times. The data set contains two full days’ worth of data. Here, we are filtering the data to a 14-hour peak electrical usage period, between 8 AM and 10 PM on the same day, 12/21/2019.
Drill-Down, Drill-Up, Focus, and Exclude
According to AWS, all visual types except pivot tables offer the ability to create a hierarchy of fields for a visual element. The hierarchy lets you drill down or up to see data at different levels of the hierarchy. Focus allows you to concentrate on a single element within a hierarchy of fields. Exclude allows you to remove an element from a hierarchy of fields. Below, we see an example of all four of these features, available to apply to the ‘Central Air Conditioner’. Since the AC unit is the largest consumer of electricity on average per day, applying these filters to understand its impact on the overall electrical usage may be useful to an analysis. We can also drill down to minutes from hours or up to days from hours.
Example QuickSight Analysis
A QuickSight Analysis is shared by the Analysis Author as a QuickSight Dashboard. Below, we see an example of a QuickSight Dashboard, built and shared for this demonstration. The ‘Residential Electrical Usage Analysis’ is built from the three data sets created earlier. From those data sets, we have constructed several visuals, including a geospatial diagram, donut chart, heat map, KPI, combination chart, stacked vertical bar chart, and line graph. Each visual’s title, layout, and field display has all customized. The data displayed in the visuals have been filtered differently, including by date and time, by customer id (loc_id), and by state. Conditional formatting is used to enhance the visual appearance of visuals, such as the ‘Total Electrical Cost’ KPI.
Conclusion
In part one, we learned how to ingest, transform, and enrich raw, semi-structured data, in multiple formats, using Amazon S3, AWS Glue, Amazon Athena, and AWS Lambda. We built an S3-based data lake and learned how AWS leverages open-source technologies, including Presto, Apache Hive, and Apache Parquet. In part two of this post, we used the transformed and enriched datasets, stored in the data lake, to create compelling visualizations using Amazon QuickSight.
All opinions expressed in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current or past employers or their clients.
Executing Amazon Athena Queries from JetBrains PyCharm
Posted by Gary A. Stafford in AWS, Big Data, Cloud, Python, Software Development, SQL on January 8, 2020
Amazon Athena
According to Amazon, Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Amazon Athena supports and works with a variety of popular data file formats, including CSV, JSON, Apache ORC, Apache Avro, and Apache Parquet.
The underlying technology behind Amazon Athena is Presto, the popular, open-source distributed SQL query engine for big data, created by Facebook. According to AWS, the Athena query engine is based on Presto 0.172. Athena is ideal for quick, ad-hoc querying, but it can also handle complex analysis, including large joins, window functions, and arrays. In addition to Presto, Athena also uses Apache Hive to define tables.
Athena Query Editor
In the previous post, Getting Started with Data Analysis on AWS using AWS Glue, Amazon Athena, and QuickSight, we used the Athena Query Editor to construct and test SQL queries against semi-structured data in an S3-based Data Lake. The Athena Query Editor has many of the basic features Data Engineers and Analysts expect, including SQL syntax highlighting, code auto-completion, and query formatting. Queries can be run directly from the Editor, saved for future reference, and query results downloaded. The Editor can convert SELECT queries to CREATE TABLE AS (CTAS) and CREATE VIEW AS statements. Access to AWS Glue data sources is also available from within the Editor.
Full-Featured IDE
Although the Athena Query Editor is fairly functional, many Engineers perform a majority of their software development work in a fuller-featured IDE. The choice of IDE may depend on one’s predominant programming language. According to the PYPL Index, the ten most popular, current IDEs are:
- Microsoft Visual Studio
- Android Studio
- Eclipse
- Visual Studio Code
- Apache NetBeans
- JetBrains PyCharm
- JetBrains IntelliJ
- Apple Xcode
- Sublime Text
- Atom
Within the domains of data science, big data analytics, and data analysis, languages such as SQL, Python, Java, Scala, and R are common. Although I work in a variety of IDEs, my go-to choices are JetBrains PyCharm for Python (including for PySpark and Jupyter Notebook development) and JetBrains IntelliJ for Java and Scala (including Apache Spark development). Both these IDEs also support many common SQL-based technologies, out-of-the-box, and are easily extendable to add new technologies.
Athena Integration with PyCharm
Utilizing the extensibility of the JetBrains suite of professional development IDEs, it is simple to add Amazon Athena to the list of available database drivers and make JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) connections to Athena instances on AWS.
Downloading the Athena JDBC Driver
To start, download the Athena JDBC Driver from Amazon. There are two versions, based on your choice of Java JDKs. Considering Java 8 was released six years ago (March 2014), most users will likely want the AthenaJDBC42-2.0.9.jar is compatible with JDBC 4.2 and JDK 8.0 or later.
Installation Guide
AWS also supplies a JDBC Driver Installation and Configuration Guide. The guide, as well as the Athena JDBC and ODBC Drivers, are produced by Simba Technologies (acquired by Magnitude Software). Instructions for creating an Athena Driver starts on page 23.
Creating a New Athena Driver
From PyCharm’s Database Tool Window, select the Drivers dialog box, select the downloaded Athena JDBC Driver JAR. Select com.simba.athena.jdbc.Driver in the Class dropdown. Name the Driver, ‘Amazon Athena.’
You can configure the Athena Driver further, using the Options and Advanced tabs.
Creating a New Athena Data Source
From PyCharm’s Database Tool Window, select the Data Source dialog box to create a new connection to your Athena instance. Choose ‘Amazon Athena’ from the list of available Database Drivers.
You will need four items to create an Athena Data Source:
- Your IAM User Access Key ID
- Your IAM User Secret Access Key
- The AWS Region of your Athena instance (e.g., us-east-1)
- An existing S3 bucket location to store query results
The Athena connection URL is a combination of the AWS Region and the S3 bucket, items 3 and 4, above. The format of the Athena connection URL is as follows.
jdbc:awsathena://AwsRegion=your-region;S3OutputLocation=s3://your-bucket-name/query-results-path
Give the new Athena Data Source a logical Name, input the User (Access Key ID), Password (Secret Access Key), and the Athena URL. To test the Athena Data Source, use the ‘Test Connection’ button.
You can create multiple Athena Data Sources using the Athena Driver. For example, you may have separate Development, Test, and Production instances of Athena, each in a different AWS Account.
Data Access
Once a successful connection has been made, switching to the Schemas tab, you should see a list of available AWS Glue Data Catalog databases. Below, we see the AWS Glue Catalog, which we created in the prior post. This Glue Data Catalog database contains ten metadata tables, each corresponding to a semi-structured, file-based data source in an S3-based data lake.
In the example below, I have chosen to limit the new Athena Data Source to a single Data Catalog database, to which the Data Source’s IAM User has access. Applying the core AWS security principle of granting least privilege, IAM Users should only have the permissions required to perform a specific set of approved tasks. This principle applies to the Glue Data Catalog databases, metadata tables, and the underlying S3 data sources.
Querying Athena from PyCharm
From within the PyCharm’s Database Tool Window, you should now see a list of the metadata tables defined in your AWS Glue Data Catalog database(s), as well as the individual columns within each table.
Similar to the Athena Query Editor, you can write SQL queries against the database tables in PyCharm. Like the Athena Query Editor, PyCharm has standard features SQL syntax highlighting, code auto-completion, and query formatting. Right-click on the Athena Data Source and choose New, then Console, to start.
Be mindful when writing queries and searching the Internet for SQL references, the Athena query engine is based on Presto 0.172. The current version of Presto, 0.234, is more than 50 releases ahead of the current Athena version. Both Athena and Presto functionality continue to change and diverge. There are also additional considerations and limitations for SQL queries in Athena to be aware of.
Whereas the Athena Query Editor is limited to only one query per query tab, in PyCharm, we can write and run multiple SQL queries in the same console window and have multiple console sessions opened to Athena at the same time.
By default, PyCharm’s query results are limited to the first ten rows of data. The number of rows displayed, as well as many other preferences, can be changed in the PyCharm’s Database Preferences dialog box.
Saving Queries and Exporting Results
In PyCharm, Athena queries can be saved as part of your PyCharm projects, as .sql files. Whereas the Athena Query Editor is limited to CSV, in PyCharm, query results can be exported in a variety of standard data file formats.
Athena Query History
All Athena queries ran from PyCharm are recorded in the History tab of the Athena Console. Although PyCharm shows query run times, the Athena History tab also displays the amount of data scanned. Knowing the query run time and volume of data scanned is useful when performance tuning queries.
Other IDEs
The technique shown for JetBrains PyCharm can also be applied to other JetBrains products, including GoLand, DataGrip, PhpStorm, and IntelliJ (shown below).
This blog represents my own view points and not of my employer, Amazon Web Services.
Getting Started with Data Analysis on AWS using AWS Glue, Amazon Athena, and QuickSight: Part 1
Posted by Gary A. Stafford in AWS, Bash Scripting, Big Data, Cloud, Python, Serverless, Software Development on January 5, 2020
Introduction
According to Wikipedia, data analysis is “a process of inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, informing conclusion, and supporting decision-making.” In this two-part post, we will explore how to get started with data analysis on AWS, using the serverless capabilities of Amazon Athena, AWS Glue, Amazon QuickSight, Amazon S3, and AWS Lambda. We will learn how to use these complementary services to transform, enrich, analyze, and visualize semi-structured data.
Data Analysis—discovering useful information, informing conclusion, and supporting decision-making. –Wikipedia
In part one, we will begin with raw, semi-structured data in multiple formats. We will discover how to ingest, transform, and enrich that data using Amazon S3, AWS Glue, Amazon Athena, and AWS Lambda. We will build an S3-based data lake, and learn how AWS leverages open-source technologies, such as Presto, Apache Hive, and Apache Parquet. In part two, we will learn how to further analyze and visualize the data using Amazon QuickSight. Here’s a quick preview of what we will build in part one of the post.
Demonstration
In this demonstration, we will adopt the persona of a large, US-based electric energy provider. The energy provider has developed its next-generation Smart Electrical Monitoring Hub (Smart Hub). They have sold the Smart Hub to a large number of residential customers throughout the United States. The hypothetical Smart Hub wirelessly collects detailed electrical usage data from individual, smart electrical receptacles and electrical circuit meters, spread throughout the residence. Electrical usage data is encrypted and securely transmitted from the customer’s Smart Hub to the electric provider, who is running their business on AWS.
Customers are able to analyze their electrical usage with fine granularity, per device, and over time. The goal of the Smart Hub is to enable the customers, using data, to reduce their electrical costs. The provider benefits from a reduction in load on the existing electrical grid and a better distribution of daily electrical load as customers shift usage to off-peak times to save money.
Preview of post’s data in Amazon QuickSight.
The original concept for the Smart Hub was developed as part of a multi-day training and hackathon, I recently attended with an AWSome group of AWS Solutions Architects in San Francisco. As a team, we developed the concept of the Smart Hub integrated with a real-time, serverless, streaming data architecture, leveraging AWS IoT Core, Amazon Kinesis, AWS Lambda, and Amazon DynamoDB.
From left: Bruno Giorgini, Mahalingam (‘Mahali’) Sivaprakasam, Gary Stafford, Amit Kumar Agrawal, and Manish Agarwal.
This post will focus on data analysis, as opposed to the real-time streaming aspect of data capture or how the data is persisted on AWS.
High-level AWS architecture diagram of the demonstration.
Featured Technologies
The following AWS services and open-source technologies are featured prominently in this post.
Amazon S3-based Data Lake
An Amazon S3-based Data Lake uses Amazon S3 as its primary storage platform. Amazon S3 provides an optimal foundation for a data lake because of its virtually unlimited scalability, from gigabytes to petabytes of content. Amazon S3 provides ‘11 nines’ (99.999999999%) durability. It has scalable performance, ease-of-use features, and native encryption and access control capabilities.
AWS Glue
AWS Glue is a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service to prepare and load data for analytics. AWS Glue discovers your data and stores the associated metadata (e.g., table definition and schema) in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. Once cataloged, your data is immediately searchable, queryable, and available for ETL.
AWS Glue Data Catalog
The AWS Glue Data Catalog is an Apache Hive Metastore compatible, central repository to store structural and operational metadata for data assets. For a given data set, store table definition, physical location, add business-relevant attributes, as well as track how the data has changed over time.
AWS Glue Crawler
An AWS Glue Crawler connects to a data store, progresses through a prioritized list of classifiers to extract the schema of your data and other statistics, and then populates the Glue Data Catalog with this metadata. Crawlers can run periodically to detect the availability of new data as well as changes to existing data, including table definition changes. Crawlers automatically add new tables, new partitions to an existing table, and new versions of table definitions. You can even customize Glue Crawlers to classify your own file types.
AWS Glue ETL Job
An AWS Glue ETL Job is the business logic that performs extract, transform, and load (ETL) work in AWS Glue. When you start a job, AWS Glue runs a script that extracts data from sources, transforms the data, and loads it into targets. AWS Glue generates a PySpark or Scala script, which runs on Apache Spark.
Amazon Athena
Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena supports and works with a variety of standard data formats, including CSV, JSON, Apache ORC, Apache Avro, and Apache Parquet. Athena is integrated, out-of-the-box, with AWS Glue Data Catalog. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.
The underlying technology behind Amazon Athena is Presto, the open-source distributed SQL query engine for big data, created by Facebook. According to the AWS, the Athena query engine is based on Presto 0.172 (released April 9, 2017). In addition to Presto, Athena uses Apache Hive to define tables.
Amazon QuickSight
Amazon QuickSight is a fully managed business intelligence (BI) service. QuickSight lets you create and publish interactive dashboards that can then be accessed from any device, and embedded into your applications, portals, and websites.
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda automatically runs code without requiring the provisioning or management servers. AWS Lambda automatically scales applications by running code in response to triggers. Lambda code runs in parallel. With AWS Lambda, you are charged for every 100ms your code executes and the number of times your code is triggered. You pay only for the compute time you consume.
Smart Hub Data
Everything in this post revolves around data. For the post’s demonstration, we will start with four categories of raw, synthetic data. Those data categories include Smart Hub electrical usage data, Smart Hub sensor mapping data, Smart Hub residential locations data, and electrical rate data. To demonstrate the capabilities of AWS Glue to handle multiple data formats, the four categories of raw data consist of three distinct file formats: XML, JSON, and CSV. I have attempted to incorporate as many ‘real-world’ complexities into the data without losing focus on the main subject of the post. The sample datasets are intentionally small to keep your AWS costs to a minimum for the demonstration.
To further reduce costs, we will use a variety of data partitioning schemes. According to AWS, by partitioning your data, you can restrict the amount of data scanned by each query, thus improving performance and reducing cost. We have very little data for the demonstration, in which case partitioning may negatively impact query performance. However, in a ‘real-world’ scenario, there would be millions of potential residential customers generating terabytes of data. In that case, data partitioning would be essential for both cost and performance.
Smart Hub Electrical Usage Data
The Smart Hub’s time-series electrical usage data is collected from the customer’s Smart Hub. In the demonstration’s sample electrical usage data, each row represents a completely arbitrary five-minute time interval. There are a total of ten electrical sensors whose electrical usage in kilowatt-hours (kW) is recorded and transmitted. Each Smart Hub records and transmits electrical usage for 10 device sensors, 288 times per day (24 hr / 5 min intervals), for a total of 2,880 data points per day, per Smart Hub. There are two days worth of usage data for the demonstration, for a total of 5,760 data points. The data is stored in JSON Lines format. The usage data will be partitioned in the Amazon S3-based data lake by date (e.g., ‘dt=2019-12-21’).
Note the electrical usage data contains nested data. The electrical usage for each of the ten sensors is contained in a JSON array, within each time series entry. The array contains ten numeric values of type, double.
Real data is often complex and deeply nested. Later in the post, we will see that AWS Glue can map many common data types, including nested data objects, as illustrated below.
Smart Hub Sensor Mappings
The Smart Hub sensor mappings data maps a sensor column in the usage data (e.g., ‘s_01’ to the corresponding actual device (e.g., ‘Central Air Conditioner’). The data contains the device location, wattage, and the last time the record was modified. The data is also stored in JSON Lines format. The sensor mappings data will be partitioned in the Amazon S3-based data lake by the state of the residence (e.g., ‘state=or’ for Oregon).
Smart Hub Locations
The Smart Hub locations data contains the geospatial coordinates, home address, and timezone for each residential Smart Hub. The data is stored in CSV format. The data for the four cities included in this demonstration originated from OpenAddresses, ‘the free and open global address collection.’ There are approximately 4k location records. The location data will be partitioned in the Amazon S3-based data lake by the state of the residence where the Smart Hub is installed (e.g., ‘state=or’ for Oregon).
Electrical Rates
Lastly, the electrical rate data contains the cost of electricity. In this demonstration, the assumption is that the rate varies by state, by month, and by the hour of the day. The data is stored in XML, a data export format still common to older, legacy systems. The electrical rate data will not be partitioned in the Amazon S3-based data lake.
Data Analysis Process
Due to the number of steps involved in the data analysis process in the demonstration, I have divided the process into four logical stages: 1) Raw Data Ingestion, 2) Data Transformation, 3) Data Enrichment, and 4) Data Visualization and Business Intelligence (BI).
Full data analysis workflow diagram (click to enlarge…)
Raw Data Ingestion
In the Raw Data Ingestion stage, semi-structured CSV-, XML-, and JSON-format data files are copied to a secure Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket. Within the bucket, data files are organized into folders based on their physical data structure (schema). Due to the potentially unlimited number of data files, files are further organized (partitioned) into subfolders. Organizational strategies for data files are based on date, time, geographic location, customer id, or other common data characteristics.
This collection of semi-structured data files, S3 buckets, and partitions form what is referred to as a Data Lake. According to AWS, a data lake is a centralized repository that allows you to store all your structured and unstructured data at any scale.
A series of AWS Glue Crawlers process the raw CSV-, XML-, and JSON-format files, extracting metadata, and creating table definitions in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. According to AWS, an AWS Glue Data Catalog contains metadata tables, where each table specifies a single data store.
Data Transformation
In the Data Transformation stage, the raw data in the previous stage is transformed. Data transformation may include both modifying the data and changing the data format. Data modifications include data cleansing, re-casting data types, changing date formats, field-level computations, and field concatenation.
The data is then converted from CSV-, XML-, and JSON-format to Apache Parquet format and written back to the Amazon S3-based data lake. Apache Parquet is a compressed, efficient columnar storage format. Amazon Athena, like many Cloud-based services, charges you by the amount of data scanned per query. Hence, using data partitioning, bucketing, compression, and columnar storage formats, like Parquet, will reduce query cost.
Lastly, the transformed Parquet-format data is cataloged to new tables, alongside the raw CSV, XML, and JSON data, in the Glue Data Catalog.
Data Enrichment
According to ScienceDirect, data enrichment or augmentation is the process of enhancing existing information by supplementing missing or incomplete data. Typically, data enrichment is achieved by using external data sources, but that is not always the case.
Data Enrichment—the process of enhancing existing information by supplementing missing or incomplete data. –ScienceDirect
In the Data Enrichment stage, the Parquet-format Smart Hub usage data is augmented with related data from the three other data sources: sensor mappings, locations, and electrical rates. The customer’s Smart Hub usage data is enriched with the customer’s device types, the customer’s timezone, and customer’s electricity cost per monitored period based on the customer’s geographic location and time of day.
Once the data is enriched, it is converted to Parquet and optimized for query performance, stored in the data lake, and cataloged. At this point, the original CSV-, XML-, and JSON-format raw data files, the transformed Parquet-format data files, and the Parquet-format enriched data files are all stored in the Amazon S3-based data lake and cataloged in the Glue Data Catalog.
Data Visualization
In the final Data Visualization and Business Intelligence (BI) stage, the enriched data is presented and analyzed. There are many enterprise-grade services available for visualization and Business Intelligence, which integrate with Athena. Amazon services include Amazon QuickSight, Amazon EMR, and Amazon SageMaker. Third-party solutions from AWS Partners, available on the AWS Marketplace, include Tableau, Looker, Sisense, and Domo. In this demonstration, we will focus on Amazon QuickSight.
Getting Started
Requirements
To follow along with the demonstration, you will need an AWS Account and a current version of the AWS CLI. To get the most from the demonstration, you should also have Python 3 and jq installed in your work environment.
Source Code
All source code for this post can be found on GitHub. Use the following command to clone a copy of the project.
Source code samples in this post are displayed as GitHub Gists, which will not display correctly on some mobile and social media browsers.
TL;DR?
Just want the jump in without reading the instructions? All the AWS CLI commands, found within the post, are consolidated in the GitHub project’s README file.
CloudFormation Stack
To start, create the ‘smart-hub-athena-glue-stack’ CloudFormation stack using the smart-hub-athena-glue.yml template. The template will create (3) Amazon S3 buckets, (1) AWS Glue Data Catalog Database, (5) Data Catalog Database Tables, (6) AWS Glue Crawlers, (1) AWS Glue ETL Job, and (1) IAM Service Role for AWS Glue.
Make sure to change the DATA_BUCKET, SCRIPT_BUCKET, and LOG_BUCKET variables, first, to your own unique S3 bucket names. I always suggest using the standard AWS 3-part convention of 1) descriptive name, 2) AWS Account ID or Account Alias, and 3) AWS Region, to name your bucket (e.g. ‘smart-hub-data-123456789012-us-east-1’).
Raw Data Files
Next, copy the raw CSV-, XML-, and JSON-format data files from the local project to the DATA_BUCKET S3 bucket (steps 1a-1b in workflow diagram). These files represent the beginnings of the S3-based data lake. Each category of data uses a different strategy for organizing and separating the files. Note the use of the Apache Hive-style partitions (e.g., /smart_hub_data_json/dt=2019-12-21). As discussed earlier, the assumption is that the actual, large volume of data in the data lake would necessitate using partitioning to improve query performance.
Confirm the contents of the DATA_BUCKET S3 bucket with the following command.
There should be a total of (14) raw data files in the DATA_BUCKET S3 bucket.
Lambda Functions
Next, package the (5) Python3.8-based AWS Lambda functions for deployment.
Copy the five Lambda packages to the SCRIPT_BUCKET S3 bucket. The ZIP archive Lambda packages are accessed by the second CloudFormation stack, smart-hub-serverless. This CloudFormation stack, which creates the Lambda functions, will fail to deploy if the packages are not found in the SCRIPT_BUCKET S3 bucket.
I have chosen to place the packages in a different S3 bucket then the raw data files. In a real production environment, these two types of files would be separated, minimally, into separate buckets for security. Remember, only data should go into the data lake.
Create the second ‘smart-hub-lambda-stack’ CloudFormation stack using the smart-hub-lambda.yml CloudFormation template. The template will create (5) AWS Lambda functions and (1) Lambda execution IAM Service Role.
At this point, we have deployed all of the AWS resources required for the demonstration using CloudFormation. We have also copied all of the raw CSV-, XML-, and JSON-format data files in the Amazon S3-based data lake.
AWS Glue Crawlers
If you recall, we created five tables in the Glue Data Catalog database as part of the CloudFormation stack. One table for each of the four raw data types and one table to hold temporary ELT data later in the demonstration. To confirm the five tables were created in the Glue Data Catalog database, use the Glue Data Catalog Console, or run the following AWS CLI / jq command.
The five data catalog tables should be as follows.
We also created six Glue Crawlers as part of the CloudFormation template. Four of these Crawlers are responsible for cataloging the raw CSV-, XML-, and JSON-format data from S3 into the corresponding, existing Glue Data Catalog database tables. The Crawlers will detect any new partitions and add those to the tables as well. Each Crawler corresponds to one of the four raw data types. Crawlers can be scheduled to run periodically, cataloging new data and updating data partitions. Crawlers will also create a Data Catalog database tables. We use Crawlers to create new tables, later in the post.
Run the four Glue Crawlers using the AWS CLI (step 1c in workflow diagram).
You can check the Glue Crawler Console to ensure the four Crawlers finished successfully.
Alternately, use another AWS CLI / jq command.
When complete, all Crawlers should all be in a state of ‘Still Estimating = false’ and ‘TimeLeftSeconds = 0’. In my experience, the Crawlers can take up one minute to start, after the estimation stage, and one minute to stop when complete.
Successfully running the four Crawlers completes the Raw Data Ingestion stage of the demonstration.
Converting to Parquet with CTAS
With the Raw Data Ingestion stage completed, we will now transform the raw Smart Hub usage data, sensor mapping data, and locations data into Parquet-format using three AWS Lambda functions. Each Lambda subsequently calls Athena, which executes a CREATE TABLE AS SELECT SQL statement (aka CTAS) . Each Lambda executes a similar command, varying only by data source, data destination, and partitioning scheme. Below, is an example of the command used for the Smart Hub electrical usage data, taken from the Python-based Lambda, athena-json-to-parquet-data/index.py.
This compact, yet powerful CTAS statement converts a copy of the raw JSON- and CSV-format data files into Parquet-format, and partitions and stores the resulting files back into the S3-based data lake. Additionally, the CTAS SQL statement catalogs the Parquet-format data files into the Glue Data Catalog database, into new tables. Unfortunately, this method will not work for the XML-format raw data files, which we will tackle next.
The five deployed Lambda functions should be visible from the Lambda Console’s Functions tab.
Invoke the three Lambda functions using the AWS CLI. (part of step 2a in workflow diagram).
Here is an example of the same CTAS command, shown above for the Smart Hub electrical usage data, as it is was executed successfully by Athena.
We can view any Athena SQL query from the Athena Console’s History tab. Clicking on a query (in pink) will copy it to the Query Editor tab and execute it. Below, we see the three SQL statements executed by the Lamba functions.
AWS Glue ETL Job for XML
If you recall, the electrical rate data is in XML format. The Lambda functions we just executed, converted the CSV and JSON data to Parquet using Athena. Currently, unlike CSV, JSON, ORC, Parquet, and Avro, Athena does not support the older XML data format. For the XML data files, we will use an AWS Glue ETL Job to convert the XML data to Parquet. The Glue ETL Job is written in Python and uses Apache Spark, along with several AWS Glue PySpark extensions. For this job, I used an existing script created in the Glue ETL Jobs Console as a base, then modified the script to meet my needs.
The three Python command-line arguments the script expects (lines 10–12, above) are defined in the CloudFormation template, smart-hub-athena-glue.yml. Below, we see them on lines 10–12 of the CloudFormation snippet. They are injected automatically when the job is run and can be overridden from the command line when starting the job.
First, copy the Glue ETL Job Python script to the SCRIPT_BUCKET S3 bucket.
Next, start the Glue ETL Job (part of step 2a in workflow diagram). Although the conversion is a relatively simple set of tasks, the creation of the Apache Spark environment, to execute the tasks, will take several minutes. Whereas the Glue Crawlers took about 2 minutes on average, the Glue ETL Job could take 10–15 minutes in my experience. The actual execution time only takes about 1–2 minutes of the 10–15 minutes to complete. In my opinion, waiting up to 15 minutes is too long to be viable for ad-hoc jobs against smaller datasets; Glue ETL Jobs are definitely targeted for big data.
To check on the status of the job, use the Glue ETL Jobs Console, or use the AWS CLI.
When complete, you should see results similar to the following. Note the ‘JobRunState’ is ‘SUCCEEDED.’ This particular job ran for a total of 14.92 minutes, while the actual execution time was 2.25 minutes.
The job’s progress and the results are also visible in the AWS Glue Console’s ETL Jobs tab.
Detailed Apache Spark logs are also available in CloudWatch Management Console, which is accessible directly from the Logs link in the AWS Glue Console’s ETL Jobs tab.
The last step in the Data Transformation stage is to convert catalog the Parquet-format electrical rates data, created with the previous Glue ETL Job, using yet another Glue Crawler (part of step 2b in workflow diagram). Start the following Glue Crawler to catalog the Parquet-format electrical rates data.
This concludes the Data Transformation stage. The raw and transformed data is in the data lake, and the following nine tables should exist in the Glue Data Catalog.
If we examine the tables, we should observe the data partitions we used to organize the data files in the Amazon S3-based data lake are contained in the table metadata. Below, we see the four partitions, based on state, of the Parquet-format locations data.
Data Enrichment
To begin the Data Enrichment stage, we will invoke the AWS Lambda, athena-complex-etl-query/index.py. This Lambda accepts input parameters (lines 28–30, below), passed in the Lambda handler’s event parameter. The arguments include the Smart Hub ID, the start date for the data requested, and the end date for the data requested. The scenario for the demonstration is that a customer with the location id value, using the electrical provider’s application, has requested data for a particular range of days (start date and end date), to visualize and analyze.
The Lambda executes a series of Athena INSERT INTO SQL statements, one statement for each of the possible Smart Hub connected electrical sensors, s_01 through s_10, for which there are values in the Smart Hub electrical usage data. Amazon just released the Amazon Athena INSERT INTO a table using the results of a SELECT query capability in September 2019, an essential addition to Athena. New Athena features are listed in the release notes.
Here, the SELECT query is actually a series of chained subqueries, using Presto SQL’s WITH clause capability. The queries join the Parquet-format Smart Hub electrical usage data sources in the S3-based data lake, with the other three Parquet-format, S3-based data sources: sensor mappings, locations, and electrical rates. The Parquet-format data is written as individual files to S3 and inserted into the existing ‘etl_tmp_output_parquet’ Glue Data Catalog database table. Compared to traditional relational database-based queries, the capabilities of Glue and Athena to enable complex SQL queries across multiple semi-structured data files, stored in S3, is truly amazing!
The capabilities of Glue and Athena to enable complex SQL queries across multiple semi-structured data files, stored in S3, is truly amazing!
Below, we see the SQL statement starting on line 43.
Below, is an example of one of the final queries, for the s_10 sensor, as executed by Athena. All the input parameter values, Python variables, and environment variables have been resolved into the query.
Along with enriching the data, the query performs additional data transformation using the other data sources. For example, the Unix timestamp is converted to a localized timestamp containing the date and time, according to the customer’s location (line 7, above). Transforming dates and times is a frequent, often painful, data analysis task. Another example of data enrichment is the augmentation of the data with a new, computed column. The column’s values are calculated using the values of two other columns (line 33, above).
Invoke the Lambda with the following three parameters in the payload (step 3a in workflow diagram).
The ten INSERT INTO SQL statement’s result statuses (one per device sensor) are visible from the Athena Console’s History tab.
Each Athena query execution saves that query’s results to the S3-based data lake as individual, uncompressed Parquet-format data files. The data is partitioned in the Amazon S3-based data lake by the Smart Meter location ID (e.g., ‘loc_id=b6a8d42425fde548’).
Below is a snippet of the enriched data for a customer’s clothes washer (sensor ‘s_04’). Note the timestamp is now an actual date and time in the local timezone of the customer (e.g., ‘2019-12-21 20:10:00.000’). The sensor ID (‘s_04’) is replaced with the actual device name (‘Clothes Washer’). The location of the device (‘Basement’) and the type of electrical usage period (e.g. ‘peak’ or ‘partial-peak’) has been added. Finally, the cost column has been computed.
To transform the enriched CSV-format data to Parquet-format, we need to catalog the CSV-format results using another Crawler, first (step 3d in workflow diagram).
Optimizing Enriched Data
The previous step created enriched Parquet-format data. However, this data is not as optimized for query efficiency as it should be. Using the Athena INSERT INTO WITH SQL statement, allowed the data to be partitioned. However, the method does not allow the Parquet data to be easily combined into larger files and compressed. To perform both these optimizations, we will use one last Lambda, athena-parquet-to-parquet-elt-data/index.py. The Lambda will create a new location in the Amazon S3-based data lake, containing all the enriched data, in a single file and compressed using Snappy compression.
The resulting Parquet file is visible in the S3 Management Console.
The final step in the Data Enrichment stage is to catalog the optimized Parquet-format enriched ETL data. To catalog the data, run the following Glue Crawler (step 3i in workflow diagram
Final Data Lake and Data Catalog
We should now have the following ten top-level folders of partitioned data in the S3-based data lake. The ‘tmp’ folder may be ignored.
Similarly, we should now have the following ten corresponding tables in the Glue Data Catalog. Use the AWS Glue Console to confirm the tables exist.
Alternately, use the following AWS CLI / jq command to list the table names.
‘Unknown’ Bug
You may have noticed the four tables created with the AWS Lambda functions, using the CTAS SQL statement, erroneously have the ‘Classification’ of ‘Unknown’ as opposed to ‘parquet’. I am not sure why, I believe it is a possible bug with the CTAS feature. It seems to have no adverse impact on the table’s functionality. However, to fix the issue, run the following set of commands. This aws glue update-table hack will switch the table’s ‘Classification’ to ‘parquet’.
The results of the fix may be seen from the AWS Glue Console. All ten tables are now classified correctly.
Explore the Data
Before starting to visualize and analyze the data with Amazon QuickSight, try executing a few Athena queries against the tables in the Glue Data Catalog database, using the Athena Query Editor. Working in the Editor is the best way to understand the data, learn Athena, and debug SQL statements and queries. The Athena Query Editor has convenient developer features like SQL auto-complete and query formatting capabilities.
Be mindful when writing queries and searching the Internet for SQL references, the Athena query engine is based on Presto 0.172. The current version of Presto, 0.229, is more than 50 releases ahead of the current Athena version. Both Athena and Presto functionality has changed and diverged. There are additional considerations and limitations for SQL queries in Athena to be aware of.
Here are a few simple, ad-hoc queries to run in the Athena Query Editor.
Cleaning Up
You may choose to save the AWS resources created in part one of this demonstration, to be used in part two. Since you are not actively running queries against the data, ongoing AWS costs will be minimal. If you eventually choose to clean up the AWS resources created in part one of this demonstration, execute the following AWS CLI commands. To avoid failures, make sure each command completes before running the subsequent command. You will need to confirm the CloudFormation stacks are deleted using the AWS CloudFormation Console or the AWS CLI. These commands will not remove Amazon QuickSight data sets, analyses, and dashboards created in part two. However, deleting the AWS Glue Data Catalog and the underlying data sources will impact the ability to visualize the data in QuickSight.
Part Two
In part one, starting with raw, semi-structured data in multiple formats, we learned how to ingest, transform, and enrich that data using Amazon S3, AWS Glue, Amazon Athena, and AWS Lambda. We built an S3-based data lake and learned how AWS leverages open-source technologies, including Presto, Apache Hive, and Apache Parquet. In part two of this post, we will use the transformed and enriched datasets, stored in the data lake, to create compelling visualizations using Amazon QuickSight.
All opinions expressed in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current or past employers or their clients.
Getting Started with Data Analytics using Jupyter Notebooks, PySpark, and Docker
Posted by Gary A. Stafford in Bash Scripting, Big Data, Build Automation, DevOps, Python, Software Development on December 6, 2019
There is little question, big data analytics, data science, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), a subcategory of AI, have all experienced a tremendous surge in popularity over the last few years. Behind the marketing hype, these technologies are having a significant influence on many aspects of our modern lives. Due to their popularity and potential benefits, commercial enterprises, academic institutions, and the public sector are rushing to develop hardware and software solutions to lower the barriers to entry and increase the velocity of ML and Data Scientists and Engineers.
(courtesy Google Trends and Plotly)
Many open-source software projects are also lowering the barriers to entry into these technologies. An excellent example of one such open-source project working on this challenge is Project Jupyter. Similar to Apache Zeppelin and the newly open-sourced Netflix’s Polynote, Jupyter Notebooks enables data-driven, interactive, and collaborative data analytics.
This post will demonstrate the creation of a containerized data analytics environment using Jupyter Docker Stacks. The particular environment will be suited for learning and developing applications for Apache Spark using the Python, Scala, and R programming languages. We will focus on Python and Spark, using PySpark.
Featured Technologies
The following technologies are featured prominently in this post.
Jupyter Notebooks
According to Project Jupyter, the Jupyter Notebook, formerly known as the IPython Notebook, is an open-source web application that allows users to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations, and narrative text. Uses include data cleansing and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, data visualization, machine learning, and much more. The word, Jupyter, is a loose acronym for Julia, Python, and R, but today, Jupyter supports many programming languages.
Interest in Jupyter Notebooks has grown dramatically over the last 3–5 years, fueled in part by the major Cloud providers, AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. Amazon Sagemaker, Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce), Google Cloud Dataproc, Google Colab (Collaboratory), and Microsoft Azure Notebooks all have direct integrations with Jupyter notebooks for big data analytics and machine learning.
(courtesy Google Trends and Plotly)
Jupyter Docker Stacks
To enable quick and easy access to Jupyter Notebooks, Project Jupyter has created Jupyter Docker Stacks. The stacks are ready-to-run Docker images containing Jupyter applications, along with accompanying technologies. Currently, the Jupyter Docker Stacks focus on a variety of specializations, including the r-notebook, scipy-notebook, tensorflow-notebook, datascience-notebook, pyspark-notebook, and the subject of this post, the all-spark-notebook. The stacks include a wide variety of well-known packages to extend their functionality, such as scikit-learn, pandas, Matplotlib, Bokeh, NumPy, and Facets.
Apache Spark
According to Apache, Spark is a unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing. Starting as a research project at the UC Berkeley AMPLab in 2009, Spark was open-sourced in early 2010 and moved to the Apache Software Foundation in 2013. Reviewing the postings on any major career site will confirm that Spark is widely used by well-known modern enterprises, such as Netflix, Adobe, Capital One, Lockheed Martin, JetBlue Airways, Visa, and Databricks. At the time of this post, LinkedIn, alone, had approximately 3,500 listings for jobs that reference the use of Apache Spark, just in the United States.
With speeds up to 100 times faster than Hadoop, Apache Spark achieves high performance for static, batch, and streaming data, using a state-of-the-art DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) scheduler, a query optimizer, and a physical execution engine. Spark’s polyglot programming model allows users to write applications quickly in Scala, Java, Python, R, and SQL. Spark includes libraries for Spark SQL (DataFrames and Datasets), MLlib (Machine Learning), GraphX (Graph Processing), and DStreams (Spark Streaming). You can run Spark using its standalone cluster mode, Apache Hadoop YARN, Mesos, or Kubernetes.
PySpark
The Spark Python API, PySpark, exposes the Spark programming model to Python. PySpark is built on top of Spark’s Java API and uses Py4J. According to Apache, Py4J, a bridge between Python and Java, enables Python programs running in a Python interpreter to dynamically access Java objects in a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Data is processed in Python and cached and shuffled in the JVM.
Docker
According to Docker, their technology gives developers and IT the freedom to build, manage, and secure business-critical applications without the fear of technology or infrastructure lock-in. For this post, I am using the current stable version of Docker Desktop Community version for macOS, as of March 2020.
Docker Swarm
Current versions of Docker include both a Kubernetes and Swarm orchestrator for deploying and managing containers. We will choose Swarm for this demonstration. According to Docker, the cluster management and orchestration features embedded in the Docker Engine are built using swarmkit. Swarmkit is a separate project that implements Docker’s orchestration layer and is used directly within Docker.
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL is a powerful, open-source, object-relational database system. According to their website, PostgreSQL comes with many features aimed to help developers build applications, administrators to protect data integrity and build fault-tolerant environments, and help manage data no matter how big or small the dataset.
Demonstration
In this demonstration, we will explore the capabilities of the Spark Jupyter Docker Stack to provide an effective data analytics development environment. We will explore a few everyday uses, including executing Python scripts, submitting PySpark jobs, and working with Jupyter Notebooks, and reading and writing data to and from different file formats and a database. We will be using the latest jupyter/all-spark-notebook Docker Image. This image includes Python, R, and Scala support for Apache Spark, using Apache Toree.
Architecture
As shown below, we will deploy a Docker stack to a single-node Docker swarm. The stack consists of a Jupyter All-Spark-Notebook, PostgreSQL (Alpine Linux version 12), and Adminer container. The Docker stack will have two local directories bind-mounted into the containers. Files from our GitHub project will be shared with the Jupyter application container through a bind-mounted directory. Our PostgreSQL data will also be persisted through a bind-mounted directory. This allows us to persist data external to the ephemeral containers. If the containers are restarted or recreated, the data is preserved locally.
Source Code
All source code for this post can be found on GitHub. Use the following command to clone the project. Note this post uses the v2 branch.
git clone \ --branch v2 --single-branch --depth 1 --no-tags \ https://github.com/garystafford/pyspark-setup-demo.git
Source code samples are displayed as GitHub Gists, which may not display correctly on some mobile and social media browsers.
Deploy Docker Stack
To start, create the $HOME/data/postgres directory to store PostgreSQL data files.
mkdir -p ~/data/postgres
This directory will be bind-mounted into the PostgreSQL container on line 41 of the stack.yml file, $HOME/data/postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data. The HOME environment variable assumes you are working on Linux or macOS and is equivalent to HOMEPATH on Windows.
The Jupyter container’s working directory is set on line 15 of the stack.yml file, working_dir: /home/$USER/work. The local bind-mounted working directory is $PWD/work. This path is bind-mounted to the working directory in the Jupyter container, on line 29 of the Docker stack file, $PWD/work:/home/$USER/work. The PWD environment variable assumes you are working on Linux or macOS (CD on Windows).
By default, the user within the Jupyter container is jovyan. We will override that user with our own local host’s user account, as shown on line 21 of the Docker stack file, NB_USER: $USER. We will use the host’s USER environment variable value (equivalent to USERNAME on Windows). There are additional options for configuring the Jupyter container. Several of those options are used on lines 17–22 of the Docker stack file (gist).
The jupyter/all-spark-notebook Docker image is large, approximately 5 GB. Depending on your Internet connection, if this is the first time you have pulled this image, the stack may take several minutes to enter a running state. Although not required, I usually pull new Docker images in advance.
docker pull jupyter/all-spark-notebook:latest docker pull postgres:12-alpine docker pull adminer:latest
Assuming you have a recent version of Docker installed on your local development machine and running in swarm mode, standing up the stack is as easy as running the following docker command from the root directory of the project.
docker stack deploy -c stack.yml jupyter
The Docker stack consists of a new overlay network, jupyter_demo-net, and three containers. To confirm the stack deployed successfully, run the following docker command.
docker stack ps jupyter --no-trunc
To access the Jupyter Notebook application, you need to obtain the Jupyter URL and access token. The Jupyter URL and the access token are output to the Jupyter container log, which can be accessed with the following command.
docker logs $(docker ps | grep jupyter_spark | awk '{print $NF}')
You should observe log output similar to the following. Retrieve the complete URL, for example, http://127.0.0.1:8888/?token=f78cbe..., to access the Jupyter web-based user interface.
From the Jupyter dashboard landing page, you should see all the files in the project’s work/ directory. Note the types of files you can create from the dashboard, including Python 3, R, and Scala (using Apache Toree or spylon-kernal) notebooks, and text. You can also open a Jupyter terminal or create a new Folder from the drop-down menu. At the time of this post (March 2020), the latest jupyter/all-spark-notebook Docker Image runs Spark 2.4.5, Scala 2.11.12, Python 3.7.6, and OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM, Java 1.8.0 Update 242.
Bootstrap Environment
Included in the project is a bootstrap script, bootstrap_jupyter.sh. The script will install the required Python packages using pip, the Python package installer, and a requirement.txt file. The bootstrap script also installs the latest PostgreSQL driver JAR, configures Apache Log4j to reduce log verbosity when submitting Spark jobs, and installs htop. Although these tasks could also be done from a Jupyter terminal or from within a Jupyter notebook, using a bootstrap script ensures you will have a consistent work environment every time you spin up the Jupyter Docker stack. Add or remove items from the bootstrap script as necessary.
That’s it, our new Jupyter environment is ready to start exploring.
Running Python Scripts
One of the simplest tasks we could perform in our new Jupyter environment is running Python scripts. Instead of worrying about installing and maintaining the correct versions of Python and multiple Python packages on your own development machine, we can run Python scripts from within the Jupyter container. At the time of this post update, the latest jupyter/all-spark-notebook Docker image runs Python 3.7.3 and Conda 4.7.12. Let’s start with a simple Python script, 01_simple_script.py.
From a Jupyter terminal window, use the following command to run the script.
python3 01_simple_script.py
You should observe the following output.
Kaggle Datasets
To explore more features of the Jupyter and PySpark, we will use a publicly available dataset from Kaggle. Kaggle is an excellent open-source resource for datasets used for big-data and ML projects. Their tagline is ‘Kaggle is the place to do data science projects’. For this demonstration, we will use the Transactions from a bakery dataset from Kaggle. The dataset is available as a single CSV-format file. A copy is also included in the project.
The ‘Transactions from a bakery’ dataset contains 21,294 rows with 4 columns of data. Although certainly not big data, the dataset is large enough to test out the Spark Jupyter Docker Stack functionality. The data consists of 9,531 customer transactions for 21,294 bakery items between 2016-10-30 and 2017-04-09 (gist).
Submitting Spark Jobs
We are not limited to Jupyter notebooks to interact with Spark. We can also submit scripts directly to Spark from the Jupyter terminal. This is typically how Spark is used in a Production for performing analysis on large datasets, often on a regular schedule, using tools such as Apache Airflow. With Spark, you are load data from one or more data sources. After performing operations and transformations on the data, the data is persisted to a datastore, such as a file or a database, or conveyed to another system for further processing.
The project includes a simple Python PySpark ETL script, 02_pyspark_job.py. The ETL script loads the original Kaggle Bakery dataset from the CSV file into memory, into a Spark DataFrame. The script then performs a simple Spark SQL query, calculating the total quantity of each type of bakery item sold, sorted in descending order. Finally, the script writes the results of the query to a new CSV file, output/items-sold.csv.
Run the script directly from a Jupyter terminal using the following command.
python3 02_pyspark_job.py
An example of the output of the Spark job is shown below.
Typically, you would submit the Spark job using the spark-submit command. Use a Jupyter terminal to run the following command.
$SPARK_HOME/bin/spark-submit 02_pyspark_job.py
Below, we see the output from the spark-submit command. Printing the results in the output is merely for the purposes of the demo. Typically, Spark jobs are submitted non-interactively, and the results are persisted directly to a datastore or conveyed to another system.
Using the following commands, we can view the resulting CVS file, created by the spark job.
ls -alh output/items-sold.csv/ head -5 output/items-sold.csv/*.csv
An example of the files created by the spark job is shown below. We should have discovered that coffee is the most commonly sold bakery item with 5,471 sales, followed by bread with 3,325 sales.
Interacting with Databases
To demonstrate the flexibility of Jupyter to work with databases, PostgreSQL is part of the Docker Stack. We can read and write data from the Jupyter container to the PostgreSQL instance, running in a separate container. To begin, we will run a SQL script, written in Python, to create our database schema and some test data in a new database table. To do so, we will use the psycopg2, the PostgreSQL database adapter package for the Python, we previously installed into our Jupyter container using the bootstrap script. The below Python script, 03_load_sql.py, will execute a set of SQL statements contained in a SQL file, bakery.sql, against the PostgreSQL container instance.
The SQL file, bakery.sql.
To execute the script, run the following command.
python3 03_load_sql.py
This should result in the following output, if successful.
Adminer
To confirm the SQL script’s success, use Adminer. Adminer (formerly phpMinAdmin) is a full-featured database management tool written in PHP. Adminer natively recognizes PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, and MongoDB, among other database engines. The current version is 4.7.6 (March 2020).
Adminer should be available on localhost port 8080. The password credentials, shown below, are located in the stack.yml file. The server name, postgres, is the name of the PostgreSQL Docker container. This is the domain name the Jupyter container will use to communicate with the PostgreSQL container.
Connecting to the new bakery database with Adminer, we should see the transactions table.
The table should contain 21,293 rows, each with 5 columns of data.
pgAdmin
Another excellent choice for interacting with PostgreSQL, in particular, is pgAdmin 4. It is my favorite tool for the administration of PostgreSQL. Although limited to PostgreSQL, the user interface and administrative capabilities of pgAdmin is superior to Adminer, in my opinion. For brevity, I chose not to include pgAdmin in this post. The Docker stack also contains a pgAdmin container, which has been commented out. To use pgAdmin, just uncomment the container and re-run the Docker stack deploy command. pgAdmin should then be available on localhost port 81. The pgAdmin login credentials are in the Docker stack file.
Developing Jupyter Notebooks
The real power of the Jupyter Docker Stacks containers is Jupyter Notebooks. According to the Jupyter Project, the notebook extends the console-based approach to interactive computing in a qualitatively new direction, providing a web-based application suitable for capturing the whole computation process, including developing, documenting, and executing code, as well as communicating the results. Notebook documents contain the inputs and outputs of an interactive session as well as additional text that accompanies the code but is not meant for execution.
To explore the capabilities of Jupyter notebooks, the project includes two simple Jupyter notebooks. The first notebooks, 04_notebook.ipynb, demonstrates typical PySpark functions, such as loading data from a CSV file and from the PostgreSQL database, performing basic data analysis with Spark SQL including the use of PySpark user-defined functions (UDF), graphing the data using BokehJS, and finally, saving data back to the database, as well as to the fast and efficient Apache Parquet file format. Below we see several notebook cells demonstrating these features.
IDE Integration
Recall, the working directory, containing the GitHub source code for the project, is bind-mounted to the Jupyter container. Therefore, you can also edit any of the files, including notebooks, in your favorite IDE, such as JetBrains PyCharm and Microsoft Visual Studio Code. PyCharm has built-in language support for Jupyter Notebooks, as shown below.
As does Visual Studio Code using the Python extension.
Using Additional Packages
As mentioned in the Introduction, the Jupyter Docker Stacks come ready-to-run, with a wide variety of Python packages to extend their functionality. To demonstrate the use of these packages, the project contains a second Jupyter notebook document, 05_notebook.ipynb. This notebook uses SciPy, the well-known Python package for mathematics, science, and engineering, NumPy, the well-known Python package for scientific computing, and the Plotly Python Graphing Library. While NumPy and SciPy are included on the Jupyter Docker Image, the bootstrap script uses pip to install the required Plotly packages. Similar to Bokeh, shown in the previous notebook, we can use these libraries to create richly interactive data visualizations.
Plotly
To use Plotly from within the notebook, you will first need to sign up for a free account and obtain a username and API key. To ensure we do not accidentally save sensitive Plotly credentials in the notebook, we are using python-dotenv. This Python package reads key/value pairs from a .env file, making them available as environment variables to our notebook. Modify and run the following two commands from a Jupyter terminal to create the .env file and set you Plotly username and API key credentials. Note that the .env file is part of the .gitignore file and will not be committed to back to git, potentially compromising the credentials.
echo "PLOTLY_USERNAME=your-username" >> .env echo "PLOTLY_API_KEY=your-api-key" >> .env
The notebook expects to find the two environment variables, which it uses to authenticate with Plotly.
Shown below, we use Plotly to construct a bar chart of daily bakery items sold. The chart uses SciPy and NumPy to construct a linear fit (regression) and plot a line of best fit for the bakery data and overlaying the vertical bars. The chart also uses SciPy’s Savitzky-Golay Filter to plot the second line, illustrating a smoothing of our bakery data.
Plotly also provides Chart Studio Online Chart Maker. Plotly describes Chart Studio as the world’s most modern enterprise data visualization solutions. We can enhance, stylize, and share our data visualizations using the free version of Chart Studio Cloud.
Jupyter Notebook Viewer
Notebooks can also be viewed using nbviewer, an open-source project under Project Jupyter. Thanks to Rackspace hosting, the nbviewer instance is a free service.
Using nbviewer, below, we see the output of a cell within the 04_notebook.ipynb notebook. View this notebook, here, using nbviewer.
Monitoring Spark Jobs
The Jupyter Docker container exposes Spark’s monitoring and instrumentation web user interface. We can review each completed Spark Job in detail.
We can review details of each stage of the Spark job, including a visualization of the DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph), which Spark constructs as part of the job execution plan, using the DAG Scheduler.
We can also review the task composition and timing of each event occurring as part of the stages of the Spark job.
We can also use the Spark interface to review and confirm the runtime environment configuration, including versions of Java, Scala, and Spark, as well as packages available on the Java classpath.
Local Spark Performance
Running Spark on a single node within the Jupyter Docker container on your local development system is not a substitute for a true Spark cluster, Production-grade, multi-node Spark clusters running on bare metal or robust virtualized hardware, and managed with Apache Hadoop YARN, Apache Mesos, or Kubernetes. In my opinion, you should only adjust your Docker resources limits to support an acceptable level of Spark performance for running small exploratory workloads. You will not realistically replace the need to process big data and execute jobs requiring complex calculations on a Production-grade, multi-node Spark cluster.
We can use the following docker stats command to examine the container’s CPU and memory metrics.
docker stats --format "table {{.Name}}\t{{.CPUPerc}}\t{{.MemUsage}}\t{{.MemPerc}}"
Below, we see the stats from the Docker stack’s three containers showing little or no activity.
Compare those stats with the ones shown below, recorded while a notebook was reading and writing data, and executing Spark SQL queries. The CPU and memory output show spikes, but both appear to be within acceptable ranges.
Linux Process Monitors
Another option to examine container performance metrics is top, which is pre-installed in our Jupyter container. For example, execute the following top command from a Jupyter terminal, sorting processes by CPU usage.
top -o %CPU
We should observe the individual performance of each process running in the Jupyter container.
A step up from top is htop, an interactive process viewer for Unix. It was installed in the container by the bootstrap script. For example, we can execute the htop command from a Jupyter terminal, sorting processes by CPU % usage.
htop --sort-key PERCENT_CPU
With htop, observe the individual CPU activity. Here, the four CPUs at the top left of the htop window are the CPUs assigned to Docker. We get insight into the way Spark is using multiple CPUs, as well as other performance metrics, such as memory and swap.
Assuming your development machine is robust, it is easy to allocate and deallocate additional compute resources to Docker if required. Be careful not to allocate excessive resources to Docker, starving your host machine of available compute resources for other applications.
Notebook Extensions
There are many ways to extend the Jupyter Docker Stacks. A popular option is jupyter-contrib-nbextensions. According to their website, the jupyter-contrib-nbextensions package contains a collection of community-contributed unofficial extensions that add functionality to the Jupyter notebook. These extensions are mostly written in JavaScript and will be loaded locally in your browser. Installed notebook extensions can be enabled, either by using built-in Jupyter commands, or more conveniently by using the jupyter_nbextensions_configurator server extension.
The project contains an alternate Docker stack file, stack-nbext.yml. The stack uses an alternative Docker image, garystafford/all-spark-notebook-nbext:latest, This Dockerfile, which builds it, uses the jupyter/all-spark-notebook:latest image as a base image. The alternate image adds in the jupyter-contrib-nbextensions and jupyter_nbextensions_configurator packages. Since Jupyter would need to be restarted after nbextensions is deployed, it cannot be done from within a running jupyter/all-spark-notebook container.
Using this alternate stack, below in our Jupyter container, we see the sizable list of extensions available. Some of my favorite extensions include ‘spellchecker’, ‘Codefolding’, ‘Code pretty’, ‘ExecutionTime’, ‘Table of Contents’, and ‘Toggle all line numbers’.
Below, we see five new extension icons that have been added to the menu bar of 04_notebook.ipynb. You can also observe the extensions have been applied to the notebook, including the table of contents, code-folding, execution time, and line numbering. The spellchecking and pretty code extensions were both also applied.
Conclusion
In this brief post, we have seen how easy it is to get started learning and performing data analytics using Jupyter notebooks, Python, Spark, and PySpark, all thanks to the Jupyter Docker Stacks. We could use this same stack to learn and perform machine learning using Scala and R. Extending the stack’s capabilities is as simple as swapping out this Jupyter image for another, with a different set of tools, as well as adding additional containers to the stack, such as MySQL, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, Apache Kafka, and Apache Cassandra.
All opinions expressed in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current or past employers, their clients.
Getting Started with Apache Zeppelin on Amazon EMR, using AWS Glue, RDS, and S3: Part 2
Posted by Gary A. Stafford in AWS, Bash Scripting, Big Data, Build Automation, Cloud, DevOps, Python, Software Development on November 30, 2019
Introduction
In Part 1 of this two-part post, we created and configured the AWS resources required to demonstrate the use of Apache Zeppelin on Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR). Further, we configured Zeppelin integrations with AWS Glue Data Catalog, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for PostgreSQL, and Amazon Simple Cloud Storage Service (S3) Data Lake. We also covered how to obtain the project’s source code from the two GitHub repositories, zeppelin-emr-demo and zeppelin-emr-config. Below is a high-level architectural diagram of the infrastructure we constructed in Part 1 for this demonstration.
Part 2
In Part 2 of this post, we will explore Apache Zeppelin’s features and integration capabilities with a variety of AWS services using a series of four Zeppelin notebooks. Below is an overview of each Zeppelin notebook with a link to view it using Zepl’s free Notebook Explorer. Zepl was founded by the same engineers that developed Apache Zeppelin. Zepl’s enterprise collaboration platform, built on Apache Zeppelin, enables both Data Science and AI/ML teams to collaborate around data.
Notebook 1
The first notebook uses a small 21k row kaggle dataset, Transactions from a Bakery. The notebook demonstrates Zeppelin’s integration capabilities with the Helium plugin system for adding new chart types, the use of Amazon S3 for data storage and retrieval, and the use of Apache Parquet, a compressed and efficient columnar data storage format, and Zeppelin’s storage integration with GitHub for notebook version control.
Interpreters
When you open a notebook for the first time, you are given the choice of interpreters to bind and unbind to the notebook. The last interpreter in the list shown below, postgres, is the new PostgreSQL JDBC Zeppelin interpreter we created in Part 1 of this post. We will use this interpreter in Notebook 3.
Application Versions
The first two paragraphs of the notebook are used to confirm the version of Spark, Scala, OpenJDK, and Python we are using. Recall we updated the Spark and Python interpreters to use Python 3.
Helium Visualizations
If you recall from Part 1 of the post, we pre-installed several additional Helium Visualizations, including the Ultimate Pie Chart. Below, we see the use of the Spark SQL (%sql) interpreter to query a Spark DataFrame, return results, and visualize the data using the Ultimate Pie Chart. In addition to the pie chart, we see the other pre-installed Helium visualizations proceeding the five default visualizations, in the menu bar. With Zeppelin, all we have to do is write Spark SQL queries against the Spark DataFrame created earlier in the notebook, and Zeppelin will handle the visualization. You have some basic controls over charts using the ‘settings’ option.
Building the Data Lake
Notebook 1 demonstrates how to read and write data to S3. We read and write the Bakery dataset to both CSV-format and Apache Parquet-format, using Spark (PySpark). We also write the results of Spark SQL queries, like the one above, in Parquet, to S3.
With Parquet, data may be split into multiple files, as shown in the S3 bucket directory below. Parquet is much faster to read into a Spark DataFrame than CSV. Spark provides support for both reading and writing Parquet files. We will write all of our data to Parquet in S3, making future re-use of the data much more efficient than downloading data from the Internet, like GroupLens or kaggle, or consuming CSV from S3.
Preview S3 Data
In addition to using the Zeppelin notebook, we can preview data right in the S3 bucket web interface using the Amazon S3 Select feature. This query in place feature is helpful to quickly understand the structure and content of new data files with which you want to interact within Zeppelin.
Saving Changes to GitHub
In Part 1, we configured Zeppelin to read and write the notebooks from your own copy of the GitHub notebook repository. Using the ‘version control’ menu item, changes made to the notebooks can be committed directly to GitHub.
In GitHub, note the committer is the zeppelin user.
Notebook 2
The second notebook demonstrates the use of a single-node and multi-node Amazon EMR cluster for the exploration and analysis of public datasets ranging from approximately 100k rows up to 27MM rows, using Zeppelin. We will use the latest GroupLens MovieLens rating datasets to examine the performance characteristics of Zeppelin, using Spark, on single- verses multi-node EMR clusters for analyzing big data using a variety of Amazon EC2 Instance Types.
Multi-Node EMR Cluster
If you recall from Part 1, we waited to create this cluster due to the compute costs of running the cluster’s large EC2 instances. You should understand the cost of these resources before proceeding, and that you ensure they are destroyed immediately upon completion of the demonstration to minimize your expenses.
Normalized Instance Hours
Understanding the costs of EMR requires understanding the concept of normalized instance hours. Cluster displayed in the EMR AWS Console contains two columns, ‘Elapsed time’ and ‘Normalized instance hours’. The ‘Elapsed time’ column reflects the actual wall-clock time the cluster was used. The ‘Normalized instance hours’ column indicates the approximate number of compute hours the cluster has used, rounded up to the nearest hour.
Normalized instance hours calculations are based on a normalization factor. The normalization factor ranges from 1 for a small instance, up to 64 for an 8xlarge. Based on the type and quantity of instances in our multi-node cluster, we would use approximately 56 compute hours (aka normalized instance hours) for every one hour of wall-clock time our EMR cluster is running. Note the multi-node cluster used in our demo, highlighted in yellow above. The cluster ran for two hours, which equated to 112 normalized instance hours.
Create the Multi-Node Cluster
Create the multi-node EMR cluster using CloudFormation. Change the following nine variable values, then run the emr cloudformation create-stack API command, using the AWS CLI.
# change me
ZEPPELIN_DEMO_BUCKET="your-bucket-name"
EC2_KEY_NAME="your-key-name"
LOG_BUCKET="aws-logs-your_aws_account_id-your_region"
GITHUB_ACCOUNT="your-account-name"
GITHUB_REPO="your-new-project-name"
GITHUB_TOKEN="your-token-value"
MASTER_INSTANCE_TYPE="m5.xlarge" # optional
CORE_INSTANCE_TYPE="m5.2xlarge" # optional
CORE_INSTANCE_COUNT=3 # optional
aws cloudformation create-stack \
--stack-name zeppelin-emr-prod-stack \
--template-body file://cloudformation/emr_cluster.yml \
--parameters ParameterKey=ZeppelinDemoBucket,ParameterValue=${ZEPPELIN_DEMO_BUCKET} \
ParameterKey=Ec2KeyName,ParameterValue=${EC2_KEY_NAME} \
ParameterKey=LogBucket,ParameterValue=${LOG_BUCKET} \
ParameterKey=MasterInstanceType,ParameterValue=${MASTER_INSTANCE_TYPE} \
ParameterKey=CoreInstanceType,ParameterValue=${CORE_INSTANCE_TYPE} \
ParameterKey=CoreInstanceCount,ParameterValue=${CORE_INSTANCE_COUNT} \
ParameterKey=GitHubAccount,ParameterValue=${GITHUB_ACCOUNT} \
ParameterKey=GitHubRepository,ParameterValue=${GITHUB_REPO} \
ParameterKey=GitHubToken,ParameterValue=${GITHUB_TOKEN}
Use the Amazon EMR web interface to confirm the success of the CloudFormation stack. The fully-provisioned cluster should be in the ‘Waiting’ state when ready.
Configuring the EMR Cluster
Refer to Part 1 for the configuration steps necessary to prepare the EMR cluster and Zeppelin before continuing. Repeat all the steps used for the single-node cluster.
Monitoring with Ganglia
In Part 1, we installed Ganglia as part of creating the EMR cluster. Ganglia, according to its website, is a scalable distributed monitoring system for high-performance computing systems such as clusters and grids. Ganglia can be used to evaluate the performance of the single-node and multi-node EMR clusters. With Ganglia, we can easily view cluster and individual instance CPU, memory, and network I/O performance.
Ganglia Example: Cluster CPU
Ganglia Example: Cluster Memory
Ganglia Example: Cluster Network I/O
YARN Resource Manager
The YARN Resource Manager Web UI is also available on our EMR cluster. Using the Resource Manager, we can view the compute resource load on the cluster, as well as the individual EMR Core nodes. Below, we see that the multi-node cluster has 24 vCPUs and 72 GiB of memory available, split evenly across the three Core cluster nodes.
You might recall, the m5.2xlarge EC2 instance type, used for the three Core nodes, each contains 8 vCPUs and 32 GiB of memory. However, by default, although all 8 vCPUs are available for computation per node, only 24 GiB of the node’s 32 GiB of memory are available for computation. EMR ensures a portion of the memory on each node is reserved for other system processes. The maximum available memory is controlled by the YARN memory configuration option, yarn.scheduler.maximum-allocation-mb.
The YARN Resource Manager preview above shows the load on the Code nodes as Notebook 2 is executing the Spark SQL queries on the large MovieLens with 27MM ratings. Note that only 4 of the 24 vCPUs (16.6%) are in use, but that 70.25 of the 72 GiB (97.6%) of available memory is being used. According to Spark, because of the in-memory nature of most Spark computations, Spark programs can be bottlenecked by any resource in the cluster: CPU, network bandwidth, or memory. Most often, if the data fits in memory, the bottleneck is network bandwidth. In this case, memory appears to be the most constrained resource. Using memory-optimized instances, such as r4 or r5 instance types, might be more effective for the core nodes than the m5 instance types.
MovieLens Datasets
By changing one variable in the notebook, we can work with the latest, smaller GroupLens MovieLens dataset containing approximately 100k rows (ml-latest-small) or the larger dataset, containing approximately 27M rows (ml-latest). For this demo, try both datasets on both the single-node and multi-node clusters. Compare the Spark SQL paragraph execution times for each of the four variations, including single-node with the small dataset, single-node with the large dataset, multi-node with the small dataset, and multi-node with the large dataset. Observe how fast the SQL queries are executed on the single-node versus multi-node cluster. Try switching to a different Core node instance type, such as r5.2xlarge. Try creating a cluster with additional Core nodes. How is the compute time effected?
Terminate the multi-node EMR cluster to save yourself the expense before continuing to Notebook 3.
aws cloudformation delete-stack \
--stack-name=zeppelin-emr-prod-stack
Notebook 3
The third notebook demonstrates Amazon EMR and Zeppelin’s integration capabilities with AWS Glue Data Catalog as an Apache Hive-compatible metastore for Spark SQL. We will create an Amazon S3-based Data Lake using the AWS Glue Data Catalog and a set of AWS Glue Crawlers.
Glue Crawlers
Before continuing with Notebook 3, run the two Glue Crawlers using the AWS CLI.
aws glue start-crawler --name bakery-transactions-crawler aws glue start-crawler --name movie-ratings-crawler
The two Crawlers will create a total of seven tables in the Glue Data Catalog database.
If we examine the Glue Data Catalog database, we should now observe several tables, one for each dataset found in the S3 bucket. The location of each dataset is shown in the ‘Location’ column of the tables view.
From the Zeppelin notebook, we can even use Spark SQL to query the AWS Glue Data Catalog, itself, for its databases and the tables within them.
According to Amazon, the Glue Data Catalog tables and databases are containers for the metadata definitions that define a schema for underlying source data. Using Zeppelin’s SQL interpreter, we can query the Data Catalog database and return the underlying source data. The SQL query example, below, demonstrates how we can perform a join across two tables in the data catalog database, representing two different data sources, and return results.
Notebook 4
The fourth notebook demonstrates Zeppelin’s ability to integrate with an external data source. In this case, we will interact with data in an Amazon RDS PostgreSQL relational database using three methods, including the Psycopg 2 PostgreSQL adapter for Python, Spark’s native JDBC capability, and Zeppelin’s JDBC Interpreter.
First, we create a new schema and four related tables for the RDS PostgreSQL movie ratings database, using the Psycopg 2 PostgreSQL adapter for Python and the SQL file we copied to S3 in Part 1.
The RDS database’s schema, shown below, approximates the schema of the four CSV files from the GroupLens MovieLens rating dataset we used in Notebook 2.
Since the schema of the PostgreSQL database matches the MovieLens dataset files, we can import the data from the CVS files, downloaded from GroupLens, directly into the RDS database, again using the Psycopg PostgreSQL adapter for Python.
According to the Spark documentation, Spark SQL also includes a data source that can read data from other databases using JDBC. Using Spark’s JDBC capability and the PostgreSQL JDBC Driver we installed in Part 1, we can perform Spark SQL queries against the RDS database using PySpark (%spark.pyspark). Below, we see a paragraph example of reading the RDS database’s movies table, using Spark.
As a third method of querying the RDS database, we can use the custom Zeppelin PostgreSQL JDBC interpreter (%postgres) we created in Part 1. Although the default driver of the JDBC interpreter is set as PostgreSQL, and the associated JAR is included with Zeppelin, we overrode that older JAR, with the latest PostgreSQL JDBC Driver JAR.
Using the %postgres interpreter, we query the RDS database’s public schema, and return the four database tables we created earlier in the notebook.
Again, below, using the %postgres interpreter in the notebook’s paragraph, we query the RDS database and return data, which we then visualize using Zeppelin’s bar chart. Finally, note the use of Zeppelin Dynamic Forms in this example. Dynamic Forms allows Zeppelin to dynamically creates input forms, whose input values are then available to use programmatically. Here, we use two form input values to control the data returned from our query and the resulting visualization.
Conclusion
In this two-part post, we learned how effectively Apache Zeppelin integrates with Amazon EMR. We also learned how to extend Zeppelin’s capabilities, using AWS Glue, Amazon RDS, and Amazon S3 as a Data Lake. Beyond what was covered in this post, there are dozens of more Zeppelin and EMR features, as well as dozens of more AWS services that integrate with Zeppelin and EMR, for you to discover.
All opinions expressed in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current or past employers or their clients.
Gary Stafford
AWS Solutions Architect | AWS Certified Professional | DevOps | Azure | GCP | Containers | Serverless | Spring | Node.js
