Posts Tagged Data Science

Getting Started with Apache Zeppelin on Amazon EMR, using AWS Glue, RDS, and S3: Part 2

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 CatalogAmazon 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.

EMR-Zeppelin

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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In GitHub, note the committer is the zeppelin user.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Screen Shot 2019-12-16 at 9.48.59 PM.png

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.

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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.

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Ganglia Example: Cluster CPU

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Ganglia Example: Cluster Memory

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Getting Started with Apache Zeppelin on Amazon EMR, using AWS Glue, RDS, and S3: Part 1

Introduction

There is little question big data analyticsdata scienceartificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), a subcategory of AI, have all experienced a tremendous surge in popularity over the last 3–5 years. Behind the hype cycles and marketing buzz, these technologies are having a significant influence on many aspects of our modern lives. Due to their popularity, commercial enterprises, academic institutions, and the public sector have all rushed to develop hardware and software solutions to decrease the barrier to entry and increase the velocity of ML and Data Scientists and Engineers.

screen_shot_2019-11-17_at_7_24_10_am1Data Science: 5-Year Search Trend (courtesy Google Trends)

screen_shot_2019-11-17_at_7_24_10_am2Machine Learning: 5-Year Search Trend (courtesy Google Trends)

Technologies

All three major cloud providers, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, have rapidly maturing big data analytics, data science, and AI and ML services. AWS, for example, introduced Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR) in 2009, primarily as an Apache Hadoop-based big data processing service. Since then, according to Amazon, EMR has evolved into a service that uses Apache SparkApache Hadoop, and several other leading open-source frameworks to quickly and cost-effectively process and analyze vast amounts of data. More recently, in late 2017, Amazon released SageMaker, a service that provides the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly and securely.

Simultaneously, organizations are building solutions that integrate and enhance these Cloud-based big data analytics, data science, AI, and ML services. One such example is Apache Zeppelin. Similar to the immensely popular Project Jupyter and the newly open-sourced Netflix’s Polynote, Apache Zeppelin is a web-based, polyglot, computational notebook. Zeppelin enables data-driven, interactive data analytics and document collaboration using a number of interpreters such as Scala (with Apache Spark), Python (with Apache Spark), Spark SQL, JDBC, Markdown, Shell and so on. Zeppelin is one of the core applications supported natively by Amazon EMR.

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In the following two-part post, we will explore the use of Apache Zeppelin on EMR for data science and data analytics using a series of Zeppelin notebooks. The notebooks feature the use of AWS Glue, the fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easy to prepare and load data for analytics. The notebooks also feature the use of Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for PostgreSQL and Amazon Simple Cloud Storage Service (S3). Amazon S3 will serve as a Data Lake to store our unstructured data. Given the current choice of Zeppelin’s more than twenty different interpreters, we will use Python3 and Apache Spark, specifically Spark SQL and PySpark, for all notebooks.

zeppelin_header

We will build an economical single-node EMR cluster for data exploration, as well as a larger multi-node EMR cluster for analyzing large data sets. Amazon S3 will be used to store input and output data, while intermediate results are stored in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) on the EMR cluster. Amazon provides a good overview of EMR architecture. Below is a high-level architectural diagram of the infrastructure we will construct during Part 1 for this demonstration.

EMR-Zeppelin.png

Notebook Features

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, including Moonsoo Lee, Zepl CTO and creator for 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Demonstration

In Part 1 of the post, as a DataOps Engineer, we will create and configure the AWS resources required to demonstrate the use of Apache Zeppelin on EMR, using an AWS Glue Data Catalog, Amazon RDS PostgreSQL database, and an S3-based data lake. In Part 2 of this post, as a Data Scientist, we will explore Apache Zeppelin’s features and integration capabilities with a variety of AWS services using the Zeppelin notebooks.

Source Code

The demonstration’s source code is contained in two public GitHub repositories. The first repository, zeppelin-emr-demo, includes the four Zeppelin notebooks, organized according to the conventions of Zeppelin’s pluggable notebook storage mechanisms.

.
├── 2ERVVKTCG
│   └── note.json
├── 2ERYY923A
│   └── note.json
├── 2ESH8DGFS
│   └── note.json
├── 2EUZKQXX7
│   └── note.json
├── LICENSE
└── README.md

Zeppelin GitHub Storage

During the demonstration, changes made to your copy of the Zeppelin notebooks running on EMR will be automatically pushed back to GitHub when a commit occurs. To accomplish this, instead of just cloning a local copy of my zeppelin-emr-demo project repository, you will want your own copy, within your personal GitHub account. You could folk my zeppelin-emr-demo GitHub repository or copy a clone into your own GitHub repository.

To make a copy of the project in your own GitHub account, first, create a new empty repository on GitHub, for example, ‘my-zeppelin-emr-demo-copy’. Then, execute the following commands from your terminal, to clone the original project repository to your local environment, and finally, push it to your GitHub account.

# change me
GITHUB_ACCOUNT="your-account-name" # i.e. garystafford
GITHUB_REPO="your-new-project-name" # i.e. my-zeppelin-emr-demo-copy

# shallow clone into new directory
git clone --branch master \
    --single-branch --depth 1 --no-tags \
    https://github.com/garystafford/zeppelin-emr-demo.git \
    ${GITHUB_REPO}

# re-initialize repository
cd ${GITHUB_REPO}
rm -rf .git
git init

# re-commit code
git add -A
git commit -m "Initial commit of my copy of zeppelin-emr-demo"

# push to your repo
git remote add origin \
    https://github.com/$GITHUB_ACCOUNT/$GITHUB_REPO.git
git push -u origin master

GitHub Personal Access Token

To automatically push changes to your GitHub repository when a commit occurs, Zeppelin will need a GitHub personal access token. Create a personal access token with the scope shown below. Be sure to keep the token secret. Make sure you do not accidentally check your token value into your source code on GitHub. To minimize the risk, change or delete the token after completing the demo.

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The second repository, zeppelin-emr-config, contains the necessary bootstrap files, CloudFormation templates, and PostgreSQL DDL (Data Definition Language) SQL script.

.
├── LICENSE
├── README.md
├── bootstrap
│   ├── bootstrap.sh
│   ├── emr-config.json
│   ├── helium.json
├── cloudformation
│   ├── crawler.yml
│   ├── emr_single_node.yml
│   ├── emr_cluster.yml
│   └── rds_postgres.yml
└── sql
    └── ratings.sql

Use the following AWS CLI command to clone the GitHub repository to your local environment.

git clone --branch master \
    --single-branch --depth 1 --no-tags \
    https://github.com/garystafford/zeppelin-emr-demo-setup.git

Requirements

To follow along with the demonstration, you will need an AWS Account, an existing Amazon S3 bucket to store EMR configuration and data, and an EC2 key pair. You will also need a current version of the AWS CLI installed in your work environment. Due to the particular EMR features, we will be using, I recommend using the us-east-1 AWS Region to create the demonstration’s resources.

# create secure emr config and data bucket
# change me
ZEPPELIN_DEMO_BUCKET="your-bucket-name"

aws s3api create-bucket \
    --bucket ${ZEPPELIN_DEMO_BUCKET}
aws s3api put-public-access-block \
    --bucket ${ZEPPELIN_DEMO_BUCKET} \
    --public-access-block-configuration \
    BlockPublicAcls=true,IgnorePublicAcls=true,BlockPublicPolicy=true,RestrictPublicBuckets=true

Copy Configuration Files to S3

To start, we need to copy three configuration files, bootstrap.sh, helium.json, and ratings.sql, from the zeppelin-emr-demo-setup project directory to our S3 bucket. Change the ZEPPELIN_DEMO_BUCKET variable value, then run the following s3 cp API command, using the AWS CLI. The three files will be copied to a bootstrap directory within your S3 bucket.

# change me
ZEPPELIN_DEMO_BUCKET="your-bucket-name"
 
aws s3 cp bootstrap/bootstrap.sh s3://${ZEPPELIN_DEMO_BUCKET}/bootstrap/
aws s3 cp bootstrap/helium.json s3://${ZEPPELIN_DEMO_BUCKET}/bootstrap/
aws s3 cp sql/ratings.sql s3://${ZEPPELIN_DEMO_BUCKET}/bootstrap/

Below, sample output from copying local files to S3.

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Create AWS Resources

We will start by creating most of the required AWS resources for the demonstration using three CloudFormation templates. We will create a single-node Amazon EMR cluster, an Amazon RDS PostgresSQL database, an AWS Glue Data Catalog database, two AWS Glue Crawlers, and a Glue IAM Role. We will wait to create the multi-node EMR cluster due to the compute costs of running large EC2 instances in the cluster. 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.

Single-Node EMR Cluster

We will start by creating the single-node Amazon EMR cluster, consisting of just one master node with no core or task nodes (a cluster of one). All operations will take place on the master node.

Default EMR Resources

The following EMR instructions assume you have already created at least one EMR cluster in the past, in your current AWS Region, using the EMR web interface with the ‘Create Cluster – Quick Options’ option. Creating a cluster this way creates several additional AWS resources, such as the EMR_EC2_DefaultRole EC2 instance profile, the default EMR_DefaultRole EMR IAM Role, and the default EMR S3 log bucket.

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If you haven’t created any EMR clusters using the EMR ‘Create Cluster – Quick Options’ in the past, don’t worry, you can also create the required resources with a few quick AWS CLI commands. Change the following LOG_BUCKET variable value, then run the aws emr and aws s3api API commands, using the AWS CLI. The LOG_BUCKET variable value follows the convention of aws-logs-awsaccount-region. For example, aws-logs-012345678901-us-east-1.

# create emr roles
aws emr create-default-roles

# create log secure bucket
# change me
LOG_BUCKET="aws-logs-your_aws_account_id-your_region"

aws s3api create-bucket --bucket ${LOG_BUCKET}
aws s3api put-public-access-block --bucket ${LOG_BUCKET} \
    --public-access-block-configuration \
    BlockPublicAcls=true,IgnorePublicAcls=true,BlockPublicPolicy=true,RestrictPublicBuckets=true

The new EMR IAM Roles can be viewed in the IAM Roles web interface.

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Often, I see tutorials that reference these default EMR resources from the AWS CLI or CloudFormation, without any understanding or explanation of how they are created.

EMR Bootstrap Script

As part of creating our EMR cluster, the CloudFormation template, emr_single_node.yml, will call the bootstrap script we copied to S3, earlier, bootstrap.sh. The bootstrap script pre-installs required Python and Linux software packages, and the PostgreSQL driver JAR. The bootstrap script also clones your copy of the zeppelin-emr-demo GitHub repository.

#!/bin/bash
set -ex

if [[ $# -ne 2 ]] ; then
    echo "Script requires two arguments"
    exit 1
fi

GITHUB_ACCOUNT=$1
GITHUB_REPO=$2

# install extra python packages
sudo python3 -m pip install psycopg2-binary boto3

# install extra linux packages
yes | sudo yum install git htop

# clone github repo
cd /tmp
git clone "https://github.com/${GITHUB_ACCOUNT}/${GITHUB_REPO}.git"

# install extra jars
POSTGRES_JAR="postgresql-42.2.8.jar"
wget -nv "https://jdbc.postgresql.org/download/${POSTGRES_JAR}"
sudo chown -R hadoop:hadoop ${POSTGRES_JAR}
mkdir -p /home/hadoop/extrajars/
cp ${POSTGRES_JAR} /home/hadoop/extrajars/

EMR Application Configuration

The EMR CloudFormation template will also modify the EMR cluster’s Spark and Zeppelin application configurations. Amongst other configuration properties, the template sets the default Python version to Python3, instructs Zeppelin to use the cloned GitHub notebook directory path, and adds the PostgreSQL Driver JAR to the JVM ClassPath. Below we can see the configuration properties applied to an existing EMR cluster.

screen-shot-2019-11-21-at-2_24_43-pm
EMR Application Versions

As of the date of this post, EMR is at version 5.28.0. Below, as shown in the EMR web interface, are the current (21) applications and frameworks available for installation on EMR.

emr-28.png

For this demo, we will install Apache Spark v2.4.4, Ganglia v3.7.2, and Zeppelin 0.8.2.

screen_shot_2019-11-17_at_8_32_17_pmApache Zeppelin: Web Interface

screen_shot_2019-11-13_at_5_40_12_pmApache Spark: DAG Visualization

screen_shot_2019-11-13_at_8_31_13_pmGanglia: Cluster CPU Monitoring

Create the EMR CloudFormation Stack

Change the following (7) 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" # i.e. garystafford
GITHUB_REPO="your-new-project-name" # i.e. my-zeppelin-emr-demo
GITHUB_TOKEN="your-token-value"
MASTER_INSTANCE_TYPE="m5.xlarge" # optional
 
aws cloudformation create-stack \
    --stack-name zeppelin-emr-dev-stack \
    --template-body file://cloudformation/emr_single_node.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=GitHubAccount,ParameterValue=${GITHUB_ACCOUNT} \
                 ParameterKey=GitHubRepository,ParameterValue=${GITHUB_REPO} \
                 ParameterKey=GitHubToken,ParameterValue=${GITHUB_TOKEN}

You can use the Amazon EMR web interface to confirm the results of the CloudFormation stack. The cluster should be in the ‘Waiting’ state.

screen_shot_2019-11-15_at_7_42_09_pm

PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS

Next, create a simple, single-AZ, single-master, non-replicated Amazon RDS PostgreSQL database, using the included CloudFormation template, rds_postgres.yml. We will use this database in Notebook 4. For the demo, I have selected the current-generation general purpose db.m4.large EC2 instance type to run PostgreSQL. You can easily change the instance type to another RDS-supported instance type to suit your own needs.

Change the following (3) variable values, then run the cloudformation create-stack API command, using the AWS CLI.

# change me
DB_MASTER_USER="your-db-username" # i.e. masteruser
DB_MASTER_PASSWORD="your-db-password" # i.e. 5up3r53cr3tPa55w0rd
MASTER_INSTANCE_TYPE="db.m4.large" # optional
 
aws cloudformation create-stack \
    --stack-name zeppelin-rds-stack \
    --template-body file://cloudformation/rds_postgres.yml \
    --parameters ParameterKey=DBUser,ParameterValue=${DB_MASTER_USER} \
                 ParameterKey=DBPassword,ParameterValue=${DB_MASTER_PASSWORD} \
                 ParameterKey=DBInstanceClass,ParameterValue=${MASTER_INSTANCE_TYPE}

You can use the Amazon RDS web interface to confirm the results of the CloudFormation stack.

screen_shot_2019-11-17_at_8_06_44_pm.png

AWS Glue

Next, create the AWS Glue Data Catalog database, the Apache Hive-compatible metastore for Spark SQL, two AWS Glue Crawlers, and a Glue IAM Role (ZeppelinDemoCrawlerRole), using the included CloudFormation template, crawler.yml. The AWS Glue Data Catalog database will be used in Notebook 3.

Change the following variable value, then run the cloudformation create-stack API command, using the AWS CLI.

# change me
ZEPPELIN_DEMO_BUCKET="your-bucket-name"
 
aws cloudformation create-stack \
    --stack-name zeppelin-crawlers-stack \
    --template-body file://cloudformation/crawler.yml \
    --parameters ParameterKey=ZeppelinDemoBucket,ParameterValue=${ZEPPELIN_DEMO_BUCKET} \
    --capabilities CAPABILITY_NAMED_IAM

You can use the AWS Glue web interface to confirm the results of the CloudFormation stack. Note the Data Catalog database and the two Glue Crawlers. We will not run the two crawlers until Part 2 of the post, so no tables will exist in the Data Catalog database, yet.

screen_shot_2019-11-27_at_8_50_09_pmscreen_shot_2019-11-27_at_8_56_47_pm

At this point in the demonstration, you should have successfully created a single-node Amazon EMR cluster, an Amazon RDS PostgresSQL database, and several AWS Glue resources, all using CloudFormation templates.

screen_shot_2019-11-21_at_4_19_01_pm

Post-EMR Creation Configuration

RDS Security

For the new EMR cluster to communicate with the RDS PostgreSQL database, we need to ensure that port 5432 is open from the RDS database’s VPC security group, which is the default VPC security group, to the security groups of the EMR nodes. Obtain the Group ID of the ElasticMapReduce-master and ElasticMapReduce-slave Security Groups from the EMR web interface.

screen_shot_2019-11-20_at_11_51_10_am

Access the Security Group for the RDS database using the RDS web interface. Change the inbound rule for port 5432 to include both Security Group IDs.

screen_shot_2019-11-20_at_11_52_23_am

SSH to EMR Master Node

In addition to the bootstrap script and configurations, we already applied to the EMR cluster, we need to make several post-EMR creation configuration changes to the EMR cluster for our demonstration. These changes will require SSH’ing to the EMR cluster. Using the master node’s public DNS address and SSH command provided in the EMR web console, SSH into the master node.

screen_shot_2019-11-15_at_7_42_09_pm_v3

If you cannot access the node using SSH, check that port 22 is open on the associated EMR master node IAM Security Group (ElasticMapReduce-master) to your IP address or address range.

screen_shot_2019-11-15_at_7_42_09_pm_v2

screen_shot_2019-11-21_at_4_51_01_pm.png

Git Permissions

We need to change permissions on the git repository we installed during the EMR bootstrapping phase. Typically, with an EC2 instance, you perform operations as the ec2-user user. With Amazon EMR, you often perform actions as the hadoop user. With Zeppelin on EMR, the notebooks perform operations, including interacting with the git repository as the zeppelin user. As a result of the bootstrap.sh script, the contents of the git repository directory, /tmp/zeppelin-emr-demo/, are owned by the hadoop user and group by default.

screen_shot_2019-11-17_at_8_01_24_pm

We will change their owner to the zeppelin user and group. We could not perform this step as part of the bootstrap script since the the zeppelin user and group did not exist at the time the script was executed.

cd /tmp/zeppelin-emr-demo/
sudo chown -R zeppelin:zeppelin .

The results should look similar to the following output.

screen_shot_2019-11-17_at_8_02_16_pm

Pre-Install Visualization Packages

Next, we will pre-install several Apache Zeppelin Visualization packages. According to the Zeppelin website, an Apache Zeppelin Visualization is a pluggable package that can be loaded/unloaded on runtime through the Helium framework in Zeppelin. We can use them just like any other built-in visualization in the notebook. A Visualization is a javascript npm package. For example, here is a link to the ultimate-pie-chart on the public npm registry.

We can pre-load plugins by replacing the /usr/lib/zeppelin/conf/helium.json file with the version of helium.json we copied to S3, earlier, and restarting Zeppelin. If you have a lot of Visualizations or package types or use any DataOps automation to create EMR clusters, this approach is much more efficient and repeatable than manually loading plugins using the Zeppelin UI, each time you create a new EMR cluster. Below, the helium.json file, which pre-loads (8) Visualization packages.

{
    "enabled": {
        "ultimate-pie-chart": "ultimate-pie-chart@0.0.2",
        "ultimate-column-chart": "ultimate-column-chart@0.0.2",
        "ultimate-scatter-chart": "ultimate-scatter-chart@0.0.2",
        "ultimate-range-chart": "ultimate-range-chart@0.0.2",
        "ultimate-area-chart": "ultimate-area-chart@0.0.1",
        "ultimate-line-chart": "ultimate-line-chart@0.0.1",
        "zeppelin-bubblechart": "zeppelin-bubblechart@0.0.4",
        "zeppelin-highcharts-scatterplot": "zeppelin-highcharts-scatterplot@0.0.2"
    },
    "packageConfig": {},
    "bundleDisplayOrder": [
        "ultimate-pie-chart",
        "ultimate-column-chart",
        "ultimate-scatter-chart",
        "ultimate-range-chart",
        "ultimate-area-chart",
        "ultimate-line-chart",
        "zeppelin-bubblechart",
        "zeppelin-highcharts-scatterplot"
    ]
}

Run the following commands to load the plugins and adjust the permissions on the file.

# change me
ZEPPELIN_DEMO_BUCKET="your-bucket-name"
 
sudo aws s3 cp s3://${ZEPPELIN_DEMO_BUCKET}/bootstrap/helium.json \
    /usr/lib/zeppelin/conf/helium.json
sudo chown zeppelin:zeppelin /usr/lib/zeppelin/conf/helium.json

Create New JDBC Interpreter

Lastly, we need to create a new Zeppelin JDBC Interpreter to connect to our RDS database. By default, Zeppelin has several interpreters installed. You can review a list of available interpreters using the following command.

sudo sh /usr/lib/zeppelin/bin/install-interpreter.sh --list

screen_shot_2019-11-18_at_6_29_40_am

The new JDBC interpreter will allow us to connect to our RDS PostgreSQL database, using Java Database Connectivity (JDBC). First, ensure all available interpreters are installed, including the current Zeppelin JDBC driver (org.apache.zeppelin:zeppelin-jdbc:0.8.0) to /usr/lib/zeppelin/interpreter/jdbc.

Creating a new interpreter is a two-part process. In this stage, we install the required interpreter files on the master node using the following command. Then later, in the Zeppelin web interface, we will configure the new PostgreSQL JDBC interpreter. Note we must provide a unique name for the interpreter (I chose ‘postgres’ in this case), which we will refer to in part two of the interpreter creation process.

sudo sh /usr/lib/zeppelin/bin/install-interpreter.sh --all
 
sudo sh /usr/lib/zeppelin/bin/install-interpreter.sh \
    --name "postgres" \
    --artifact org.apache.zeppelin:zeppelin-jdbc:0.8.0

To complete the post-EMR creation configuration on the master node, we must restart Zeppelin for our changes to take effect.

sudo stop zeppelin && sudo start zeppelin

In my experience, it could take 2–3 minutes for the Zeppelin UI to become fully responsive after a restart.

screen_shot_2019-11-18_at_10_01_54_pm

Zeppelin Web Interface Access

With all the EMR application configuration complete, we will access the Zeppelin web interface running on the master node. Use the Zeppelin connection information provided in the EMR web interface to setup SSH tunneling to the Zeppelin web interface, running on the master node. Using this method, we can also access the Spark History Server, Ganglia, and Hadoop Resource Manager web interfaces; all links are provided from EMR.

screen_shot_2019-11-15_at_7_42_09_pm

To set up a web connection to the applications installed on the EMR cluster, I am using FoxyProxy as a proxy management tool with Google Chrome.

screen_shot_2019-11-17_at_8_22_09_pm.png

If everything is working so far, you should see the Zeppelin web interface with all four Zeppelin notebooks available from the cloned GitHub repository. You will be logged in as the anonymous user. Zeppelin offers authentication for accessing notebooks on the EMR cluster. For brevity, we will not cover setting up authentication in Zeppelin, using Shiro Authentication.

screen_shot_2019-11-17_at_8_32_17_pm.png

To confirm the path to the local, cloned copy of the GitHub notebook repository, is correct, check the Notebook Repos interface, accessible under the Settings dropdown (anonymous user) in the upper right of the screen. The value should match the ZEPPELIN_NOTEBOOK_DIR configuration property value in the emr_single_node.yml CloudFormation template we executed earlier.

screen_shot_2019-11-18_at_10_04_23_pm

To confirm the Helium Visualizations were pre-installed correctly, using the helium.json file, open the Helium interface, accessible under the Settings dropdown (anonymous user) in the upper right of the screen.

screen_shot_2019-11-15_at_7_45_28_pmNote the enabled visualizations. And, it is easy to enable additional plugins through the web interface.screen_shot_2019-11-15_at_7_45_33_pm

New PostgreSQL JDBC Interpreter

If you recall, earlier, we install the required interpreter files on the master node using the following command using the bootstrap script. We will now complete the process of configuring the new PostgreSQL JDBC interpreter. Open the Interpreter interface, accessible under the Settings dropdown (anonymous user) in the upper right of the screen.

The title of the new interpreter must match the name we used to install the interpreter files, ‘postgres’. The interpreter group will be ‘jdbc’. There are, minimally, three properties we need to configure for your specific RDS database instance, including default.url, default.user, and default.password. These should match the values you used to create your RDS instance, earlier. Make sure to includes the database name in the default.url. An example is shown below.

default.url: jdbc:postgresql://zeppelin-demo.abcd1234efg56.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com:5432/ratings
default.user: masteruser
default.password: 5up3r53cr3tPa55w0rd

We also need to provide a path to the PostgreSQL driver JAR dependency. This path is the location where we placed the JAR using the bootstrap.sh script, earlier, /home/hadoop/extrajars/postgresql-42.2.8.jar. Save the new interpreter and make sure it starts successfully (shows a green icon).

screen_shot_2019-11-17_at_9_03_02_pm.png

screen_shot_2019-11-18_at_6_42_13_am

Switch Interpreters to Python 3

The last thing we need to do is change the Spark and Python interpreters to use Python 3 instead of the default Python 2. On the same screen you used to create a new interpreter, modify the Spark and Python interpreters. First, for the Python interpreter, change the zeppelin.python property to python3.

screen_shot_2019-11-18_at_3_30_39_pm

Next, for the Spark interpreter, change the zeppelin.pyspark.python property to python3.

screen_shot_2019-11-18_at_3_32_34_pm

Part 2

In Part 1 of this post, we created and configured the AWS resources required to demonstrate the use of Apache Zeppelin on EMR, using an AWS Glue Data Catalog, Amazon RDS PostgreSQL database, and an S3 data lake. In Part 2 of this post, we will explore some of Apache Zeppelin’s features and integration capabilities with a variety of AWS services using the notebooks.

All opinions expressed in this post are my own and not necessarily the views of my current or past employers or their clients.

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