AWS Batch executor with Airflow - airflow

I'm currently using airflow on Amazon Web services using EC2 instances. The big issue is that the average usage of the instances are about 2%...
I'd like to use a scalable architecture and creating instances only for the duration of the job and kill it. I saw on the roadmap that AWS BATCH was suppose to be an executor in 2017 but no new about that.
Do you know if it possible to use AWS BATCH as an executor for all airflow jobs ?
Regards,
Romain.

There is no executor, but an operator is available from version 1.10. After you create an Execution Environment, Job Queue and Job Definition on AWS Batch, you can use the AWSBatchOperator to trigger Jobs.
Here is the source code.

Currently there is a SequentialExecutor, a LocalExecutor, a DaskExecutor, a CeleryExecutor and a MesosExecutor. I heard they're working on AIRFLOW-1899 targeted for 2.0 to introduce a KubernetesExecutor. So, looking at Dask and Celery it doesn't seem they support a mode where their workers are created per task. Mesos might, Kubernetes should, but then you'd have to scale the clusters for the workers accordingly to account for turning off the nodes when un-needed.
We did a little work to get a cloud formation setup where celery workers scale out and in based on metrics from cloud-watch of the average cpu load across the tagged workers.

You would need to create a custom Executor (extended from BaseExecutor) capable of submitting and monitoring the AWS Batch jobs. Also may need to create a custom Docker image for the instances.

I found this repository in my case is working quite well https://github.com/aelzeiny/airflow-aws-executors I'm using Batch jobs with FARGATE_SPOT with computation engine.
I'm just struggling with the logging on AWS CloudWatch and the return status in AWS batch but from Airflow perspective is working

Related

Managed AWS Airflow with ECS Fargate DAG Jobs

Reading this article: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/running-airflow-on-aws-fargate/
It isn't clear to me; is it possible to run MWAA and execute jobs on ECS Fargate? Or to execute jobs on Ecstatics Fargate do you need to run then entire Airflow stack on ECS Fargate?
I'd recommend reading this document on AWS MWAAs, specifically the section on Architecture as it should provide you with more context.
It isn't clear to me; is it possible to run MWAA and execute jobs on ECS Fargate?
Yes. A MWAA runs it's Airflow components (scheduler, worker etc) on Fargate and will automatically execute it's jobs in Fargate containers. It will also scale the number of containers to meet demand.
There are also a plethora of Airflow integrations out there that you can use to offload the tasks/nodes within a DAG to other services (such as ECS, Batch etc.)
It is not well documented but it is possible. We are successfully running MWAA with ECS task operator and custom images.
Basically you'll need the following:
MWAA environment
MWAA execution role with added permissions to run tasks in ECS and access CloudWatch logs
ECS Tasks definitions
You'll also need to add apache-airflow[amazon] in MWAA Requirements file.

Airflow versus AWS Step Functions for workflow

I am working on a project that grabs a set of input data from AWS S3, pre-processes and divvies it up, spins up 10K batch containers to process the divvied data in parallel on AWS Batch, post-aggregates the data, and pushes it to S3.
I already have software patterns from other projects for Airflow + Batch, but have not dealt with the scaling factors of 10k parallel tasks. Airflow is nice since I can look at which tasks failed and retry a task after debugging. But dealing with that many tasks on one Airflow EC2 instance seems like a barrier. Other option would be to have one task that kicks off the 10k containers and monitors it from there.
I have no experience with Step Functions, but have heard it's AWS's Airflow. There looks to be plenty of patterns online for Step Functions + Batch. Does Step Functions seem like a good path to check out for my use case? Do you get the same insights on failing jobs / ability to retry tasks as you do with Airflow?
I have worked on both Apache Airflow and AWS Step Functions and here are some insights:
Step Functions provide out of the box maintenance. It has high availability and scalability that is required for your use-case, for Airflow we'll have to do to it with auto-scaling/load balancing on servers or containers (kubernetes).*
Both Airflow and Step Functions have user friendly UI's. While Airflow supports multiple representations of the state machine, Step Functions only display state machine as DAG's.
As of version 2.0, Airflow's Rest API is now stable. AWS Step Functions are also supported by a range of production graded cli and SDK's.
Airflow has server costs while Step Functions have 4000/month free step executions (free tier) and $0.000025/step after that. e.g. if you use 10K steps for AWS Batch that run once daily, you will be priced $0.25 per day ($7.5 per month). The price for Airflow server (t2.large ec2 1 year reserved instance) is $41.98 per month. We will have to use AWS Batch for either case.**
AWS Batch can integrate to both Airflow and Step Functions.
You can clear and rerun a failed task in Apache Airflow, but in Step Functions you will have to create a custom implementation to handle that. You may handle automated retries with back-offs in Step Functions definition as well.
For failed task in Step Functions you will get a visual representation of failed state and the detailed message when you click it. You may also use aws cli or sdk to get the details.
Step Functions use easy to use JSON as state machine definition, while Airflow uses Python script.
Step Functions support async callbacks, i.e. state machine pauses until an external source notifies it to resume. While Airflow has yet to add this feature.
Overall, I see more advantages of using AWS Step Functions. You will have to consider maintenance cost and development cost for both services as per your use case.
UPDATES (AWS Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow Service):
*With AWS Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow service, you can offload deployment, maintenance, autoscaling/load balancing and security of your Airflow Service to AWS. But please consider the version number you're willing to settle for, as AWS managed services are mostly behind the latest version. (e.g. As of March 08, 2021, the latest version of open source airflow is 2.01, while MWAA allows version 1.10.12)
**MWAA costs on environment, instance and storage. More details here.
I have used both Airflow and Step Functions in my personal and work projects.
In general I liked step functions but the fact that you need to schedule the execution with Event Bridge is super annoying. Actually I think here Airflow could just act as a triggered for the step functions.
If Airflow would be cheaper to manage, I would always opt for it because I find managing Json based pipelines a hustle whenever you need to detour from the main use case. This always happen for me somehow.This becomes even a more complex issue when you need to have source control.
This one is a bit more subjective assessment but I find the monitoring capability of Airflow far greater than for step functions.
Also some information about the usage of Airflow vs Step functions
Aws currently has managed airflow which is priced per hour and you don’t need to have dedicated ec2. On the other hand step functions are aws lambdas that have an execution time limit of 15min which makes them not the best candidate for a long running pipelines

Airflow resource pool usage on DAG-level?

I'm looking at using airflow for scheduling test-cases execution against shared hw in a lab and have some best practice questions on how to use the resource pool concept for a whole DAG-instance instead of just on task level.
Basically a test-case needs (executed as a instance of a test-case DAG (deploy/execute/collect/un-deploy)) certain physical resources and should therefore request them from the different resource pools(modelling the the physical resources) in order to not run into conflicting concurrent usage with other triggered DAG-instances.
My question is if it's possible to define resource usage on DAG-instance level or if it's only possible on task level. If the latter, then would one parallel task claiming the resource during the whole DAG-instance execution be the best way to handle not having to pass the resource claim between all tasks in the DAG? Other alternatives?
Update after questions from Viraj and dlamblin:
Running 1.10.1
Running LocalExecutor
Have verified that I can run parallel DAGS with concurrent tasks
The resources I want to have custom pools for are not worker resources, rather different peripheral hw units such as relays, routers etc that the tasks running in parallel on a the localexecutor should block on if they are occupied(0 custom resource pool instances left) by an/-other task(s)
The Kubernetes Executor allows for certain node type affinity to be configured on the task or dag level. The Celery Executor has a queue concept to select from a worker group with certain resources available to the worker. You're probably not using a Local Executor as your question doesn't quite make sense for that case.

Sharing large intermediate state between Airflow tasks

We have an Airflow deployment with Celery executors.
Many of our DAGs require a local processing step of some file in a BashOperator or PythonOperator.
However, in our understanding the tasks of a given DAG may not always be scheduled on the same machine.
The options for state sharing between tasks I've gathered so far:
Use Local Executors - this may suffice for one team, depending on the load, but may not scale to the wider company
Use XCom - does this have a size limit? Probably unsuitable for large files
Write custom Operators for every combination of tasks that need local processing in between. This approach reduces modularity of tasks and requires replicating existing operators' code.
Use Celery queues to route DAGs to the same worker (docs) - This option seems attractive at first, but what would be an appropriate way to set it up in order to avoid routing everything to one executor, or crafting a million queues?
Use a shared network storage in all machines that run executors - Seems like an additional infrastructure burden, but is a possibility.
What is the recommended way to do sharing of large intermediate state, such as files, between tasks in Airflow?
To clarify something: No matter how you setup airflow, there will only be one executor running.
The executor runs on the same machine as the scheduler.
Currently (current is airflow 1.9.0 at time of writing) there is no safe way to run multiple schedulers, so there will only ever be one executor running.
Local executor executes the task on the same machine as the scheduler.
Celery Executor just puts tasks in a queue to be worked on the celery workers.
However, the question you are asking does apply to Celery workers. If you use Celery Executor you will probably have multiple celery workers.
Using network shared storage solves multiple problems:
Each worker machine sees the same dags because they have the same dags folder
Results of operators can be stored on a shared file system
The scheduler and webserver can also share the dags folder and run on different machines
I would use network storage, and write the output file name to xcom. Then when you need to input the output from a previous task, you would read the file name from that task's Xcom and process that file.
Change datatype of column key in xcom table of airflow metastore.
Default datatype of key is: blob.
Change it to LONGBLOB. It will help you to store upto 4GB in between intermediate tasks.

How do I setup an Airflow of 2 servers?

Trying to split out Airflow processes onto 2 servers. Server A, which has been already running in standalone mode with everything on it, has the DAGs and I'd like to set it as the worker in the new setup with an additional server.
Server B is the new server which would host the metadata database on MySQL.
Can I have Server A run LocalExecutor, or would I have to use CeleryExecutor? Would airflow scheduler has to run on the server that has the DAGs right? Or does it have to run on every server in a cluster? Confused as to what dependencies there are between the processes
This article does an excellent job demonstrating how to cluster Airflow onto multiple servers.
Multi-Node (Cluster) Airflow Setup
A more formal setup for Apache Airflow is to distribute the daemons across multiple machines as a cluster.
Benefits
Higher Availability
If one of the worker nodes were to go down or be purposely taken offline, the cluster would still be operational and tasks would still be executed.
Distributed Processing
If you have a workflow with several memory intensive tasks, then the tasks will be better distributed to allow for higher utilizaiton of data across the cluster and provide faster execution of the tasks.
Scaling Workers
Horizontally
You can scale the cluster horizontally and distribute the processing by adding more executor nodes to the cluster and allowing those new nodes to take load off the existing nodes. Since workers don’t need to register with any central authority to start processing tasks, the machine can be turned on and off without any downtime to the cluster.
Vertically
You can scale the cluster vertically by increasing the number of celeryd daemons running on each node. This can be done by increasing the value in the ‘celeryd_concurrency’ config in the {AIRFLOW_HOME}/airflow.cfg file.
Example:
celeryd_concurrency = 30
You may need to increase the size of the instances in order to support a larger number of celeryd processes. This will depend on the memory and cpu intensity of the tasks you’re running on the cluster.
Scaling Master Nodes
You can also add more Master Nodes to your cluster to scale out the services that are running on the Master Nodes. This will mainly allow you to scale out the Web Server Daemon incase there are too many HTTP requests coming for one machine to handle or if you want to provide Higher Availability for that service.
One thing to note is that there can only be one Scheduler instance running at a time. If you have multiple Schedulers running, there is a possibility that multiple instances of a single task will be scheduled. This could cause some major problems with your Workflow and cause duplicate data to show up in the final table if you were running some sort of ETL process.
If you would like, the Scheduler daemon may also be setup to run on its own dedicated Master Node.
Apache Airflow Cluster Setup Steps
Pre-Requisites
The following nodes are available with the given host names:
master1 - Will have the role(s): Web Server, Scheduler
master2 - Will have the role(s): Web Server
worker1 - Will have the role(s): Worker
worker2 - Will have the role(s): Worker
A Queuing Service is Running. (RabbitMQ, AWS SQS, etc)
You can install RabbitMQ by following these instructions: Installing RabbitMQ
If you’re using RabbitMQ, it is recommended that it is also setup to be a cluster for High Availability. Setup a Load Balancer to proxy requests to the RabbitMQ instances.
Additional Documentation
Documentation: https://airflow.incubator.apache.org/
Install Documentation: https://airflow.incubator.apache.org/installation.html
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/apache/incubator-airflow
All airflow processes need to have the same contents in their airflow_home folder. This includes configuration and dags. If you only want server B to run your MySQL database, you do not need to worry about any airflow specifics. Simply install the database on server B and change your airflow.cfg's sql_alchemy_conn parameter to point to your database on Server B and run airflow initdb from Server A.
If you also want to run airflow processes on server B, you would have to look into scaling using the CeleryExecutor.

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