Posts in category: Amazon AWS

Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that allows you to build, train, deploy, and monitor machine learning (ML) models. Its modular design allows you to pick and choose the features that suit your use cases at different stages of the ML lifecycle. Amazon SageMaker offers capabilities that abstract the heavy lifting of infrastructure management and provides the agility and scalability you desire for large-scale ML activities with different features and a pay-as-you-use pricing model.

In this post, we outline the pricing model for Amazon SageMaker and offer some best practices on how you can optimize your cost of using Amazon SageMaker resources to effectively and efficiently build, train, and deploy your ML models. In addition, the post offers programmatic approaches for automatically stopping or detecting idle resources that are incurring costs, allowing you to avoid unnecessary charges.

Amazon SageMaker pricing

Machine Learning is an iterative process with different computational needs for prototyping the code and exploring the dataset, processing, training, and hosting the model for real-time and offline predictions. In a traditional paradigm, estimating the right amount of computational resources to support different workloads is difficult, and often leads to over-provisioning resources. The modular design of Amazon SageMaker offers flexibility to optimize the scalability, performance, and costs for your ML workloads depending on each stage of the ML lifecycle. For more information about how Amazon SageMaker works, see the following resources:

1. What Is Amazon SageMaker?
2. Amazon SageMaker Studio
3. Get Started with Amazon SageMaker

The following diagram is a simplified illustration of the modular design for each stage of the ML lifecycle. Each environment, called build, train (and tune), and deploy, use separate compute resources with different pricing.

For more information about the costs involved in your ML journey on Amazon SageMaker, see Lowering total cost of ownership for machine learning and increasing productivity with Amazon SageMaker.

With Amazon SageMaker, you pay only for what you use. Pricing within Amazon SageMaker is broken down by the ML stage: building, processing, training, and model deployment (or hosting), and further explained in this section.

Build environment

Amazon SageMaker offers two environments for building your ML models: SageMaker Studio Notebooks and on-demand notebook instances. Amazon SageMaker Studio is a fully integrated development environment for ML, using a collaborative, flexible, and managed Jupyter notebook experience. You can now access Amazon SageMaker Studio, the first fully integrated development environment (IDE), for free, and you only pay for the AWS services that you use within Studio. For more information, see Amazon SageMaker Studio Tour.

Prices for compute instances are the same for both Studio and on-demand instances, as outlined in Amazon SageMaker Pricing. With Studio, your notebooks and associated artifacts such as data files and scripts are persisted on Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS). For more information about storage charges, see Amazon EFS Pricing.

An Amazon SageMaker on-demand notebook instance is a fully managed compute instance running the Jupyter Notebook app. Amazon SageMaker manages creating the instance and related resources. Notebooks contain everything needed to run or recreate an ML workflow. You can use Jupyter notebooks in your notebook instance to prepare and process data, write code to train models, deploy models to Amazon SageMaker hosting, and test or validate your models.

Processing

Amazon SageMaker Processing lets you easily run your preprocessing, postprocessing, and model evaluation workloads on a fully managed infrastructure. Amazon SageMaker manages the instances on your behalf, and launches the instances for the job and terminates the instances when the job is done. For more information, see Amazon SageMaker Processing – Fully Managed Data Processing and Model Evaluation.

Training and tuning

Depending on the size of your training dataset and how quickly you need the results, you can use resources ranging from a single general-purpose instance to a distributed cluster of GPU instances. Amazon SageMaker manages these resources on your behalf, and provisions, launches, and then stops and terminates the compute resources automatically for the training jobs. With Amazon SageMaker training and tuning, you only pay for the time the instances were consumed for training. For more information, see Train and tune a deep learning model at scale.

Amazon SageMaker automatic model tuning, also known as hyperparameter tuning, finds the best version of a model by running many training jobs on your dataset using the algorithm and ranges of hyperparameters that you specify on a cluster of instances you define. Similar to training, you only pay for the resources consumed during the tuning time.

Deployment and hosting

You can perform model deployment for inference in two different ways:

• ML hosting for real-time inference – After you train your model, you can deploy it to get predictions in real time using a persistent endpoint with Amazon SageMaker hosting services
• Batch transform – You can use Amazon SageMaker batch transform to get predictions on an entire dataset offline

The Amazon SageMaker pricing model

The following table summarizing the pricing model for Amazon SageMaker.

You can also get started with Amazon SageMaker with the free tier. For more information about pricing, see Amazon SageMaker Pricing.

Right-sizing compute resources for Amazon SageMaker notebooks, processing jobs, training, and deployment

With the pricing broken down based on time and resources you use in each stage of an ML lifecycle, you can optimize the cost of Amazon SageMaker and only pay for what you really need. In this section, we discuss general guidelines to help you choose the right resources for your Amazon SageMaker ML lifecycle.

Amazon SageMaker currently offers ML compute instances on the following instance families:

• T – General-purpose burstable performance instances (when you don’t need consistently high levels of CPU, but benefit significantly from having full access to very fast CPUs when you need them)
• M – General-purpose instances
• C – Compute-optimized instances (ideal for compute bound applications)
• R – Memory-optimized instances (designed to deliver fast performance for workloads that process large datasets in memory)
• P, G and Inf – Accelerated compute instances (using hardware accelerators, or co-processors)
• EIA – Inference acceleration instances (used for Amazon Elastic Inference)

Instance type consideration for a computational workload running on an Amazon SageMaker ML compute instance is no different than running on an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance. For more information about instance specifications, such as number of virtual CPU and amount of memory, see Amazon SageMaker Pricing.

Build environment

The Amazon SageMaker notebook instance environment is suitable for interactive data exploration, script writing, and prototyping of feature engineering and modeling. We recommend using notebooks with instances that are smaller in compute for interactive building and leaving the heavy lifting to ephemeral training, tuning, and processing jobs with larger instances, as explained in the following sections. This way, you don’t keep a large instance (or a GPU) constantly running with your notebook. This can help you minimize your build costs by selecting the right instance.

For the building stage, the size of an Amazon SageMaker on-demand notebook instance depends on the amount of data you need to load in-memory for meaningful exploratory data analyses (EDA) and the amount of computation required. We recommend starting small with general-purpose instances (such as T or M families) and scale up as needed.

The burstable T family of instances is ideal for notebook activity because computation only comes when you run a cell but you want full power from CPU. For example, ml.t2.medium is sufficient for most of basic data processing, feature engineering, and EDA that deal with small datasets that can be held within 4 GB memory. You can select an instance with larger memory capacity, such as ml.m5.12xlarge (192 GB memory), if you need to load significantly more data into the memory for feature engineering. If your feature engineering involves heavy computational work (such as image processing), you can use one of the compute-optimized C family instances, such as ml.c5.xlarge.

The benefit of Studio notebooks over on-demand notebook instances is that with Studio, the underlying compute resources are fully elastic and you can change the instance on the fly, allowing you to scale the compute up and down as your compute demand changes, for example from ml.t3.medium to ml.g4dn.xlarge as your build compute demand increases, without interrupting your work or managing infrastructure. Moving from one instance to another is seamless, and you can continue working while the instance launches. With on-demand notebook instances, you need to stop the instance, update the setting, and restart with the new instance type.

To keep your build costs down, we recommend stopping your on-demand notebook instances or shutting down your Studio instances when you don’t need them. In addition, you can use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) condition keys as an effective way to restrict certain instance types, such as GPU instances, for specific users, thereby controlling costs. We go into more detail in the section Recommendations for avoiding unnecessary costs.

Processing environment

After you complete data exploration and prototyping with a subset of your data and are ready to apply the preprocessing and transformation on the entire data, you can launch an Amazon SageMaker Processing job with your processing script that you authored during the EDA phase without scaling up the relatively small notebook instance you have been using. Amazon SageMaker Processing dispatches all things needed for processing the entire dataset, such as code, container, and data, to a compute infrastructure separate from the Amazon SageMaker notebook instance. Amazon SageMaker Processing takes care of the resource provisioning, data and artifact transfer, and shutdown of the infrastructure once the job finishes.

The benefit of using Amazon SageMaker Processing is that you only pay for the processing instances while the job is running. Therefore, you can take advantage of powerful instances without worrying too much about the cost. For example, as a general recommendation, you can use an ml.m5.4xlarge for medium jobs (MBs of GB of data), ml.c5.18xlarge for workloads requiring heavy computational capacity, or ml.r5.8xlarge when you want to load multiple GBs of data in memory for processing, and only pay for the time of the processing job. Sometimes, you may consider using a larger instance to get the job done quicker, and end up paying less in total cost of the job.

Alternatively, for distributed processing, you can use a cluster of smaller instances by increasing the instance count. For this purpose, you could shard input objects by Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) key by setting s3_data_distribution_type='ShardedByS3Key' inside a ProcessingInput so that each instance receives about the same number of more manageable input objects, and instead you can use smaller instances in the cluster, leading to potential cost savings. Furthermore, you could perform the processing job asynchronously with .run(…, wait = False), as if you submit the job and get your notebook cell back immediately for other activities, leading to a more efficient use of your build compute instance time.

Training and tuning environment

The same compute paradigm and benefits for Amazon SageMaker Processing apply to Amazon SageMaker Training and Tuning. When you use fully managed Amazon SageMaker Training, it dispatches all things needed for a training job, such as code, container, and data, to a compute infrastructure separate from the Amazon SageMaker notebook instance. Therefore, your training jobs aren’t limited by the compute resource of the notebook instance. The Amazon SageMaker Training Python SDK also supports asynchronous training when you call .fit(…, wait = False). You get your notebook cell back immediately for other activities, such as calling .fit() again for another training job with a different ML compute instance for profiling purposes or a variation of the hyperparameter settings for experimentation purposes. Because ML training can often be a compute-intensive and time-consuming part of the ML lifecycle, with training jobs happening asynchronously in a remote compute infrastructure, you can safely shut down the notebook instance for cost-optimizing purposes if starting a training job is the last task of your day. We discuss how to automatically shut down unused, idle on-demand notebook instances in the section Recommendations for avoiding unnecessary costs.

Cost-optimization factors that you need to consider when selecting instances for training include the following:

• Instance family – What type of instance is suitable for the training? You need to optimize for overall cost of training, and sometimes selecting a larger instance can lead to much faster training and thus less total cost; can the algorithm even utilize a GPU instance?
• Instance size – What is the minimum compute and memory capacity your algorithm requires to run the training? Can you use distributed training?
• Instance count – If you can use distributed training, what instance type (CPU or GPU) can you use in the cluster, and how many?

As for the choice of instance type, you could base your decision on what algorithms or frameworks you use for the workload. If you use the Amazon SageMaker built-in algorithms, which give you a head start without any sophisticated programming, see Instance types for built-in algorithms for detailed guidelines. For example, XGBoost currently only trains using CPUs. It is a memory-bound (as opposed to compute-bound) algorithm. So, a general-purpose compute instance (for example, M5) is a better choice than a compute-optimized instance (for example, C4).

Furthermore, we recommend having enough total memory in selected instances to hold the training data. Although it supports the use of disk space to handle data that doesn’t fit into main memory (the out-of-core feature available with the libsvm input mode), writing cache files onto disk slows the algorithm processing time. For the object detection algorithm, we support the following GPU instances for training:

• ml.p2.xlarge
• ml.p2.8xlarge
• ml.p2.16xlarge
• ml.p3.2xlarge
• ml.p3.8xlarge
• ml.p3.16xlarge

We recommend using GPU instances with more memory for training with large batch sizes. You can also run the algorithm on multi-GPU and multi-machine settings for distributed training.

If you’re bringing your own algorithms with script mode or with custom containers, you need to first clarify whether the framework or algorithm supports CPU, GPU, or both to decide the instance type to run the workload. For example, scikit-learn doesn’t support GPU, meaning that training with accelerated compute instances doesn’t result in any material gain in runtime but leads to overpaying for the instance. To determine which instance type and number of instances, if training in distributed fashion, for your workload, it’s highly recommended to profile your jobs to find the sweet spot between number of instance and runtime, which translates to cost. For more information, see Amazon Web Services achieves fasted training times for BERT and Mask R-CNN. You should also find the balance between instance type, number of instances, and runtime. For more information, see Train ALBERT for natural language processing with TensorFlow on Amazon SageMaker.

When it comes to GPU-powered P and G families of instances, you need to consider the differences. For example, P3 GPU compute instances are designed to handle large distributed training jobs for fastest time to train, whereas G4 instances are suitable for cost-effective, small-scale training jobs.

Another factor to consider in training is that you can select from either On-Demand Instances or Spot Instances. On-demand ML instances for training let you pay for ML compute capacity based on the time the instance is consumed, at on-demand rates. However, for jobs that can be interrupted or don’t need to start and stop at specific times, you can choose managed Spot Instances (Managed Spot Training). Amazon SageMaker can reduce the cost of training models by up to 90% over On-Demand Instances, and manages the Spot interruptions on your behalf.

Deployment/hosting environment

In many cases, up to 90% of the infrastructure spend for developing and running an ML application is on inference, making the need for high-performance, cost-effective ML inference infrastructure critical. This is mainly because the build and training jobs aren’t frequent and you only pay for the duration of build and training, but an endpoint instance is running all the time (while the instance is in service). Therefore, selecting the right way to host and the right type of instance can have a large impact on the total cost of ML projects.

For model deployment, it’s important to work backwards from your use case. What is the frequency of the prediction? Do you expect live traffic to your application and real-time response to your clients? Do you have many models trained for different subsets of data for the same use case? Does the prediction traffic fluctuate? Is latency of inference a concern?

There are hosting options from Amazon SageMaker for each of these situations. If your inference data comes in batches, Amazon SageMaker batch transform is a cost-effective way to obtain predictions with fully managed infrastructure provisioning and tear-down. If you have trained multiple models for one single use case, a multi-modal endpoint is a great way to save cost on hosting ML models that are trained on a per-user or segment basis. For more information, see Save on inference costs by using Amazon SageMaker multi-model endpoints.

After you decide how to host your models, load testing is the best practice to determine the appropriate instance type and fleet size, with or without autoscaling for your live endpoint to avoid over-provisioning and paying extra for capacity you don’t need. Algorithms that train most efficiently on GPUs might not benefit from GPUs for efficient inference. It’s important to load test to determine the most cost-effective solution. The following flowchart summarizes the decision process.

Amazon SageMaker offers different options for instance families that you can use for inference, from general-purpose instances to compute-optimized and GPU-powered instances. Each family is optimized for a different application, and not all instance types are suitable for inference jobs. For example, Amazon Inf1 instances offer high throughput and low latency and have the lowest cost per inference in the cloud. G4 instances for inference G4 have the lowest cost per inference for GPU instances and offer greater performance, lower latency, and reduced cost per inference for GPU instances. And P3 instances are optimized for training, and are designed to handle large distributed training jobs for fastest time to train, and thus not fully utilized for inference.

Another way to lower inference cost is to use Elastic Inference for cost savings of up to 75% on inference jobs. Picking an instance type and size for inference may not be easy, given the many factors involved. For example, for larger models, the inference latency of CPUs may not meet the needs of online applications, while the cost of a full-fledged GPU may not be justified. In addition, resources like RAM and CPU may be more important to the overall performance of your application than raw inference speed. With Elastic Inference, you attach just the right amount of GPU-powered inference acceleration to any Amazon compute instance. This is also available for Amazon SageMaker notebook instances and endpoints, bringing acceleration to built-in algorithms and to deep learning environments. This lets you select the best price/performance ratio for your application. For example, an ml.c5.large instance configured with eia1.medium acceleration costs you about 75% less than an ml.p2.xlarge, but with only 10–15% slower performance. For more information, see Amazon Elastic Inference – GPU-Powered Deep Learning Inference Acceleration.

In addition, you can use Auto Scaling for Amazon SageMaker to add and remove capacity or accelerated instances to your endpoints automatically, whenever needed. With this feature, instead of having to closely monitor inference volume and change the endpoint configuration in response, your endpoint automatically adjusts the number of instances up or down in response to actual workloads, determined by using Amazon CloudWatch metrics and target values defined in the policy. For more information, see AWS Auto Scaling.

Recommendations for avoiding unnecessary costs

Certain Amazon SageMaker resources (such as processing, training, tuning, and batch transform instances) are ephemeral, and Amazon SageMaker automatically launches the instance and terminates them when the job is done. However, other resources (such as build compute resources or hosting endpoints) aren’t ephemeral, and the user has control over when these resources should be stopped or terminated. Therefore, knowing how to identify idle resources and stopping them can lead to better cost-optimization. This section outlines some useful methods for automating these processes.

Build environment: Automatically stopping idle on-demand notebook instances

One way to avoid the cost of idle notebook instances is to automatically stop idle instances using lifecycle configurations. With lifecycle configuration in Amazon SageMaker, you can customize your notebook environment by installing packages or sample notebooks on your notebook instance, configuring networking and security for it, or otherwise use a shell script to customize it. Such flexibility allows you to have more control over how your notebook environment is set up and run.

AWS maintains a public repository of notebook lifecycle configuration scripts that address common use cases for customizing notebook instances, including a sample bash script for stopping idle notebooks.

You can configure your notebook instance using a lifecycle configuration to automatically stop itself if it’s idle for a certain period of time (a parameter that you set). The idle state for a Jupyter notebook is defined in the following GitHub issue. To create a new lifecycle configuration for this purpose, follow these steps:

1. On the Amazon SageMaker console, choose Lifecycle configurations.
2. Choose Create a new lifecycle configuration (if you are creating a new one).
3. For Name, enter a name using alphanumeric characters and -, but no spaces. The name can have a maximum of 63 characters. For example, Stop-Idle-Instance.
4. To create a script that runs when you create the notebook and every time you start it, choose Start notebook.
5. In the Start notebook editor, enter the script.
6. Choose Create configuration.

The bash script to use for this purpose can be found on AWS Samples repository for lifecycle configuration samples. This script is basically running a cron job at a specific period of idle time, as defined with parameter IDLE_TIME in the script. You can change this time to your preference and change the script as needed on the Lifecycle configuration page.

For this script to work, the notebook should meet these two criteria:

• The notebook instance has internet connectivity to fetch the example config Python script (autostop.py) from the public repository
• The notebook instance execution role permissions to SageMaker:StopNotebookInstance to stop the notebook and SageMaker:DescribeNotebookInstance to describe the notebook

If you create notebook instances in a VPC that doesn’t allow internet connectivity, you need to add the Python script inline in the bash script. The script is available on the GitHub repo. Enter it in your bash script as follows, and use this for lifecycle configuration instead:

#!/bin/bash
set -e
# PARAMETERS
IDLE_TIME=3600

echo "Creating the autostop.py"
cat << EOF > autostop.py
##
## [PASTE PYTHON SCRIPT FROM GIT REPO HERE]
##
EOF

echo "Starting the SageMaker autostop script in cron"
(crontab -l 2>/dev/null; echo "*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/python $PWD/autostop.py --time $IDLE_TIME --ignore-connections") | crontab -

The following screenshot shows how to choose the lifecycle configuration on the Amazon SageMaker console.

Alternatively, you can store the script on Amazon S3 and connect to the script through a VPC endpoint. For more information, see New – VPC Endpoint for Amazon S3.

Now that you have created the lifecycle configuration, you can assign it to your on-demand notebook instance when creating a new one or when updating existing notebooks. To create a notebook with your lifecycle configuration (for this post, Stop-Idle-Instance), you need to assign the script to the notebook under the Additional Configuration section. All other steps are the same as outlined in Create a On-Demand Notebook Instance. To attach the lifecycle configuration to an existing notebook, you first need to stop the on-demand notebook instance, and choose Update settings to make changes to the instance. You attach the lifecycle configuration in the Additional configuration section.

Build environment: Scheduling start and stop of on-demand notebook instances

Another approach is to schedule your notebooks to start and stop at specific times. For example, if you want to start your notebooks (such as notebooks of specific groups or all notebooks in your account) at 7:00 AM and stop all of them at 9:00 PM during weekdays (Monday through Friday), you can accomplish this by using Amazon CloudWatch Events and AWS Lambda functions. For more information about configuring your Lambda functions, see Configuring functions in the AWS Lambda console. To build the schedule for this use case, you can follow the steps in the following sections.

Starting notebooks with a Lambda function

To start your notebooks with a Lambda function, complete the following steps:

1. On the Lambda console, create a Lambda function for starting on-demand notebook instances with specific keywords in their name. For this post, our development team’s on-demand notebook instances have names starting with dev-.
2. Use Python as the runtime for the function, and name the function start-dev-notebooks.

Your Lambda function should have the SageMakerFullAccess policy attached to its execution IAM role.

3. Enter the following script into the Function code editing area:

# Code to start InService Notebooks that contain specific keywords in their name
# Change "dev-" in NameContains to your specific use case

import boto3
client = boto3.client('sagemaker')
def lambda_handler(event, context):
    try:
        response_nb_list = client.list_notebook_instances(
            NameContains='dev-',     # Change this to your specific use case
            StatusEquals= 'Stopped'
                )
        for nb in response_nb_list['NotebookInstances']:
            response_nb_stop = client.start_notebook_instance(
                    NotebookInstanceName = nb['NotebookInstanceName'])
        return {"Status": "Success"} 
    except:
        return {"Status": "Failure"}

4. Under Basic Settings, change Timeout to 15 minutes (max).

This step makes sure the function has the maximum allowable timeout range during stopping and starting multiple notebooks.

5. Save your function.

Stopping notebooks with a Lambda function

To stop your notebooks with a Lambda function, follow the same steps, use the following script, and name the function stop-dev-notebooks:

# Code to stop InService Notebooks that contain specific keywords in their name
# Change "dev-" in NameContains to your specific use case

import boto3
client = boto3.client('sagemaker')
def lambda_handler(event, context):
    try:
        response_nb_list = client.list_notebook_instances(
            NameContains='dev-',     # Change this to your specific use case
            StatusEquals= 'InService'
                )
        for nb in response_nb_list['NotebookInstances']:
            response_nb_stop = client.stop_notebook_instance(
                    NotebookInstanceName = nb['NotebookInstanceName'])  
        return {"Status": "Success"}        
    except:
        return {"Status": "Failure"}

Creating a CloudWatch event

Now that you have created the functions, you need to create an event to trigger these functions on a specific schedule.

We use cron expression format for the schedule. For more information about creating your custom cron expression, see Schedule Expressions for Rules. All scheduled events use UTC time zone, and the minimum precision for schedules is 1 minute.

For example, the cron expression for 7:00 AM, Monday through Friday throughout the year, is 0 7 ? * MON-FRI *, and for 9:00 PM on the same days is 0 21 ? * MON-FRI *.

To create the event for stopping your instances on a specific schedule, complete the following steps:

1. On the CloudWatch console, under Events, choose Rules.
2. Choose Create rule.
3. Under Event Source, select Schedule, and then select Cron expression.
4. Enter your cron expression (for example, 21 ? * MON-FRI * for 9:00 PM Monday through Friday).
5. Under Targets, choose Lambda function.
6. Choose your function from the list (for this post, stop-dev-notebooks).
7. Choose Configure details

8. Add a name for your event, such as Stop-Notebooks-Event, and a description.
9. Leave Enabled
10. Choose Create.

You can follow the same steps to create scheduled event to start your notebooks on a schedule, such as 7:00 AM on weekdays, so when your staff start their day, the notebooks are ready and in service.

Hosting environment: Automatically detecting idle Amazon SageMaker endpoints

You can deploy your ML models as endpoints to test the model for real-time inference. Sometimes these endpoints are accidentally left in service, leading to ongoing charges on the account. You can automatically detect these endpoints and take corrective actions (such as deleting them) by using CloudWatch Events and Lambda functions. For example, you can detect if endpoints have been idle for the past number of hours (with no invocations over a certain period, such as 24 hours). The function script we provide in this section detects idle endpoints and publishes a message to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic with the list of idle endpoints. You can subscribe the account admins to this topic, and they receive emails with the list of idle endpoints when detected. To create this scheduled event, follow these steps:

1. Create an SNS topic and subscribe your email or phone number to it.
2. Create a Lambda function with the following script.
   1. Your Lambda function should have the following policies attached to its IAM execution role: CloudWatchReadOnlyAccess, AmazonSNSFullAccess, and AmazonSageMakerReadOnly.

import boto3
from datetime import datetime
from datetime import timedelta

def lambda_handler(event, context):
    
    idle_threshold_hr = 24               # Change this to your threshold in hours
    
    cw = boto3.client('cloudwatch')
    sm = boto3.client('sagemaker')
    sns = boto3.client('sns')
    
    try:
        inservice_endpoints = sm.list_endpoints(
            SortBy='CreationTime',
            SortOrder='Ascending',
            MaxResults=100,
            # NameContains='string',     # for example 'dev-'
            StatusEquals='InService'
        )
        
        idle_endpoints = []
        for ep in inservice_endpoints['Endpoints']:
            
            ep_describe = sm.describe_endpoint(
                    EndpointName=ep['EndpointName']
                )
    
            metric_response = cw.get_metric_statistics(
                Namespace='AWS/SageMaker',
                MetricName='Invocations',
                Dimensions=[
                    {
                        'Name': 'EndpointName',
                        'Value': ep['EndpointName']
                        },
                        {
                         'Name': 'VariantName',
                        'Value': ep_describe['ProductionVariants'][0]['VariantName']                  
                        }
                ],
                StartTime=datetime.utcnow()-timedelta(hours=idle_threshold_hr),
                EndTime=datetime.utcnow(),
                Period=int(idle_threshold_hr*60*60), 
                Statistics=['Sum'],
                Unit='None'
                )
    
            if len(metric_response['Datapoints'])==0:     
                idle_endpoints.append(ep['EndpointName'])
        
        if len(idle_endpoints) > 0:
            response_sns = sns.publish(
                TopicArn='YOUR SNS TOPIC ARN HERE',
                Message="The following endpoints have been idle for over {} hrs. Log on to Amazon SageMaker console to take actions.nn{}".format(idle_threshold_hr, 'n'.join(idle_endpoints)),
                Subject='Automated Notification: Idle Endpoints Detected',
                MessageStructure='string'
            )
    
        return {'Status': 'Success'}
    
    except:
        return {'Status': 'Fail'}

You can also revise this code to filter the endpoints based on resource tags. For more information, see AWS Python SDK Boto3 documentation.

Investigating endpoints

This script sends an email (or text message, depending on how the SNS topic is configured) with the list of detected idle endpoints. You can then sign in to the Amazon SageMaker console and investigate those endpoints, and delete them if you find them to be unused stray endpoints. To do so, complete the following steps:

1. On the Amazon SageMaker console, under Inference, choose Endpoints.

You can see the list of all endpoints on your account in that Region.

2. Select the endpoint that you want to investigate, and under Monitor, choose View invocation metrics.
3. Under All metrics, select Invocations

You can see the invocation activities on the endpoint. If you notice no invocation event (or activity) for the duration of your interest, it means the endpoint isn’t in use and you can delete it.

4. When you’re confident you want to delete the endpoint, go back to the list of endpoints, select the endpoint you want to delete, and under the Actions menu, choose

Conclusion

This post walked you through how Amazon SageMaker pricing works, best practices for right-sizing Amazon SageMaker compute resources for different stages of an ML project, and best practices for avoiding unnecessary costs of unused resources by either automatically stopping idle on-demand notebook instances or automatically detecting idle Amazon SageMaker endpoints so you can take corrective actions.

By understanding how Amazon SageMaker works and the pricing model for Amazon SageMaker resources, you can take steps in optimizing your total cost of ML projects even further.

About the authors

Nick Minaie is an Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) Specialist Solution Architect, helping customers on their journey to well-architected machine learning solutions at scale. In his spare time, Nick enjoys family time, abstract painting, and exploring nature.

Michael Hsieh is a Senior AI/ML Specialist Solutions Architect. He works with customers to advance their ML journey with a combination of AWS ML offerings and his ML domain knowledge. As a Seattle transplant, he loves exploring the great mother nature the city has to offer such as the hiking trails, scenic kayaking in the SLU, and the sunset at the Shilshole Bay.

Read More

When machine learning (ML) is deployed in production, monitoring the model is important for maintaining the quality of predictions. Although the statistical properties of the training data are known in advance, real-life data can gradually deviate over time and impact the prediction results of your model, a phenomenon known as data drift. Detecting these conditions in production can be challenging and time-consuming, and requires a system that captures incoming real-time data, performs statistical analyses, defines rules to detect drift, and sends alerts for rule violations. Furthermore, the process must be repeated for every new iteration of the model.

Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor enables you to continuously monitor ML models in production. You can set alerts to detect deviations in the model quality and take corrective actions, such as retraining models, auditing upstream systems, or fixing data quality issues. You can use insights from Model Monitor to proactively determine model prediction variance due to data drift and then use Amazon Augmented AI (Amazon A2I), a fully managed feature in Amazon SageMaker, to send ML inferences to human workflows for review. You can use Amazon A2I for multiple purposes, such as:

• Reviewing results below a threshold
• Human oversight and audit use cases
• Augmenting AI and ML results as required

In this post, we show how to set up an ML workflow on Amazon SageMaker to train an XGBoost algorithm for breast cancer predictions. We deploy the model on a real-time inference endpoint, launch a model monitoring schedule, evaluate monitoring results, and trigger a human review loop for below-threshold predictions. We then show how the human loop workers review and update the predictions.

We walk you through the following steps using this accompanying Jupyter notebook:

1. Preprocess your input dataset.
2. Train an XGBoost model and deploy to a real-time endpoint.
3. Generate baselines and start Model Monitor.
4. Review the model monitor reports and derive insights.
5. Set up a human review loop for low-confidence detection using Amazon A2I.

Prerequisites

Before getting started, you need to create your human workforce and set up your Amazon SageMaker Studio notebook.

Creating your human workforce

For this post, you create a private work team and add only one user (you) to it. For instructions, see Create an Amazon Cognito Workforce Using the Labeling Workforces Page.

Enter your email in the email addresses box for workers. To invite your colleagues to participate in reviewing tasks, include their email addresses in this box.

After you create your private team, you receive an email from no-reply@verificationemail.com that contains your workforce username, password, and a link that you can use to log in to the worker portal. Enter the username and password you received in the email to log in. You must then create a new, non-default password. This is your private worker’s interface.

When you create an Amazon A2I human review task using your private team (explained in the Starting a human loop section), your task should appear in the Jobs section. See the following screenshot.

After you create your private workforce, you can view it on the Labeling workforces page, on the Private tab.

Setting up your Amazon SageMaker Studio notebook

To set up your notebook, complete the following steps:

1. Onboard to Amazon SageMaker Studio with the quick start procedure.
2. When you create an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role to the notebook instance, be sure to specify access to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). You can choose Any S3 Bucket or specify the S3 bucket you want to enable access to. You can use the AWS-managed policies AmazonSageMakerFullAccess and AmazonAugmentedAIFullAccess to grant general access to these two services.

3. When user is created and is active, choose Open Studio.

4. On the Studio landing page, from the File drop-down menu, choose New.
5. Choose Terminal.

6. In the terminal, enter the following code:

git clone https://github.com/aws-samples/amazon-a2i-sample-jupyter-notebooks

7. Open the notebook by choosing Amazon-A2I-with-Amazon-SageMaker-Model-Monitor.ipynb in the amazon-a2i-sample-jupyter-notebooks folder.

Preprocessing your input dataset

You can follow the steps in this post using the accompanying Jupyter notebook. Make sure you provide an S3 bucket and a prefix of your choice. We then import the Python data science libraries and the Amazon SageMaker Python SDK that we need to run through our use case.

Loading the dataset

For this post, we use a dataset for breast cancer predictions from the UCI Machine Learning Repository. Please refer to the accompanying Jupyter notebook for the code to load and split this dataset. Based on the input features, we first train a model to detect a benign (label=0) or malignant (label=1) condition.

The following screenshot shows some of the rows in the training dataset.

Training and deploying an Amazon SageMaker XGBoost model

XGBoost (eXtreme Gradient Boosting) is a popular and efficient open-source implementation of the gradient boosted trees algorithm. For our use case, we use the binary:logistic objective. The model applies logistic regression for binary classification (in this example, whether a condition is benign or malignant). The output is a probability that represents the log likelihood of the Bernoulli distribution.

With Amazon SageMaker, you can use XGBoost as a built-in algorithm or framework. For this use case, we use the built-in algorithm. To specify the Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) container location for Amazon SageMaker implementation of XGBoost, enter the following code:

from sagemaker.amazon.amazon_estimator import get_image_uri
container = get_image_uri(boto3.Session().region_name, 'xgboost', '1.0-1')

Creating the XGBoost estimator

We use the XGBoost container to construct an estimator using the Amazon SageMaker Estimator API and initiate a training job (the full walkthrough is available in the accompanying Jupyter notebook):

sess = sagemaker.Session()

xgb = sagemaker.estimator.Estimator(container,
                                    role, 
                                    train_instance_count=1, 
                                    train_instance_type='ml.m5.2xlarge',
                                    output_path='s3://{}/{}/output'.format(bucket, prefix),
                                    sagemaker_session=sess)

Specifying hyperparameters and starting training

We can now specify the hyperparameters for our training. You set hyperparameters to facilitate the estimation of model parameters from data. See the following code:

xgb.set_hyperparameters(max_depth=5,
                        eta=0.2,
                        gamma=4,
                        min_child_weight=6,
                        subsample=0.8,
                        silent=0,
                        objective='binary:logistic',
                        num_round=100)

xgb.fit({'train': s3_input_train, 'validation': s3_input_validation})

For more information, see XGBoost Parameters.

Deploying the XGBoost model

We deploy a model that’s hosted behind a real-time inference endpoint. As a prerequisite, we set up a data_capture_config for the Model Monitor after the endpoint is deployed, which enables Amazon SageMaker to collect the inference requests and responses for use in Model Monitor. For more information, see the accompanying notebook.

The deploy function returns a Predictor object that you can use for inference:

xgb_predictor = xgb.deploy(initial_instance_count=1,
                           instance_type='ml.m5.2xlarge',
                           endpoint_name=endpoint_name,
                           data_capture_config=data_capture_config)

Invoking the deployed model using the endpoint

You can now send data to this endpoint to get inferences in real time. The request and response payload, along with some additional metadata, is saved in the Amazon S3 location that you specified in DataCaptureConfig. You can follow the steps in the walkthrough notebook.

The following JSON code is an example of an inference request and response captured:

Starting Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor

Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor continuously monitors the quality of ML models in production. To start using Model Monitor, we create a baseline, inspect the baseline job results, and create a monitoring schedule.

Creating a baseline

The baseline calculations of statistics and constraints are needed as a standard against which data drift and other data quality issues can be detected. The training dataset is usually a good baseline dataset. The training dataset schema and the inference dataset schema should match (the number and order of the features). From the training dataset, you can ask Amazon SageMaker to suggest a set of baseline constraints and generate descriptive statistics to explore the data. To create the baseline, you can follow the detailed steps in the walkthrough notebook. See the following code:

# Start the baseline job
from sagemaker.model_monitor import DefaultModelMonitor
from sagemaker.model_monitor.dataset_format import DatasetFormat

my_default_monitor = DefaultModelMonitor(
    role=role,
    instance_count=1,
    instance_type='ml.m5.4xlarge',
    volume_size_in_gb=100,
    max_runtime_in_seconds=3600,
)

my_default_monitor.suggest_baseline(
    baseline_dataset=baseline_data_uri+'/train.csv',
    dataset_format=DatasetFormat.csv(header=False), # changed this to header=False since train.csv does not have header. 
    output_s3_uri=baseline_results_uri,
    wait=True
)

Inspecting baseline job results

When the baseline job is complete, we can inspect the results. Two files are generated:

• statistics.json – This file is expected to have columnar statistics for each feature in the dataset that is analyzed. For the schema of this file, see Schema for Statistics.
• constraints.json – This file is expected to have the constraints on the features observed. For the schema of this file, see Schema for Constraints.

Model Monitor computes per column/feature statistics. In the following screenshot, c0 and c1 in the name column refer to columns in the training dataset without the header row.

The constraints file is used to express the constraints that a dataset must satisfy. See the following screenshot.

Next we review the monitoring configuration in the constraints.json file:

• datatype_check_threshold – During the baseline step, the generated constraints suggest the inferred data type for each column. You can tune the monitoring_config.datatype_check_threshold parameter to adjust the threshold for when it’s flagged as a violation.
• domain_content_threshold – If there are more unknown values for a String field in the current dataset than in the baseline dataset, you can use this threshold to dictate if it needs to be flagged as a violation.
• comparison_threshold – This value is used to calculate model drift.

For more information about constraints, see Schema for Constraints.

Create a monitoring schedule

With a monitoring schedule, Amazon SageMaker can start processing jobs at a specified frequency to analyze the data collected during a given period. Amazon SageMaker compares the dataset for the current analysis with the baseline statistics and constraints provided and generates a violations report. To create an hourly monitoring schedule, enter the following code:

from sagemaker.model_monitor import CronExpressionGenerator
from time import gmtime, strftime

mon_schedule_name = 'xgb-breast-cancer-' + strftime("%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S", gmtime())
my_default_monitor.create_monitoring_schedule(
    monitor_schedule_name=mon_schedule_name,
    endpoint_input=xgb_predictor.endpoint,
    output_s3_uri=s3_report_path,
    statistics=my_default_monitor.baseline_statistics(),
    constraints=my_default_monitor.suggested_constraints(),
    schedule_cron_expression=CronExpressionGenerator.hourly(),
    enable_cloudwatch_metrics=True,

)

We then invoke the endpoint continuously to generate traffic for the model monitor to pick up. Because we set up an hourly schedule, we need to wait at least an hour for traffic to be detected.

Reviewing model monitoring

The violations file is generated as the output of a MonitoringExecution, which lists the results of evaluating the constraints (specified in the constraints.json file) against the current dataset that was analyzed. For more information about violation checks, see Schema for Violations. For our use case, the model monitor detects a data type mismatch violation in one of the requests sent to the endpoint. See the following screenshot.

For more details, see the walkthrough notebook.

Evaluating the results

To determine the next steps for our experiment, we should consider the following two perspectives:

• Model Monitor violations: We only saw the datatype_check violation from the Model Monitor; we didn’t see a model drift violation. In our use case, Model Monitor uses the robust comparison method based on the two-sample K-S test to quantify the distance between the empirical distribution of our test dataset and the cumulative distribution of the baseline dataset. This distance didn’t exceed the value set for the comparison_threshold. The prediction results are aligned with the results in the training dataset.
• Probability distribution of prediction results: We used a test dataset of 114 requests. Out of this, we see that the model predicts 60% of the requests to be malignant (over 90% probability output in the prediction results), 30% benign (less than 10% probability output in the prediction results), and the remaining 10% of the requests are indeterminate. The following chart summarizes these findings.

As a next step, you need to send the prediction results that are distributed with output probabilities of over 10% and less than 90% (because the model can’t predict with sufficient confidence) to a domain expert who can look at the model results and identify if the tumor is benign or malignant. You use Amazon A2I to set up a human review workflow and define conditions for activating the review loop.

Starting the human review workflow

To configure your human review workflow, you complete the following high-level steps:

1. Create the human task UI.
2. Create the workflow definition.
3. Set the trigger conditions to activate the human loop.
4. Start your human loop.
5. Check that the human loop tasks are complete.

Creating the human task UI

The following example code shows how to create a human task UI resource, giving a UI template in liquid HTML. This template is rendered to the human workers whenever a human loop is required. You can follow through the complete steps using the accompanying Jupyter notebook. After the template is defined, set up the UI task function and run it.

def create_task_ui():
    '''
    Creates a Human Task UI resource.

    Returns:
    struct: HumanTaskUiArn
    '''
    response = sagemaker_client.create_human_task_ui(
        HumanTaskUiName=taskUIName,
        UiTemplate={'Content': template})
    return response
# Create task UI
humanTaskUiResponse = create_task_ui()
humanTaskUiArn = humanTaskUiResponse['HumanTaskUiArn']
print(humanTaskUiArn)

Creating the workflow definition

We create the flow definition to specify the following:

• The workforce that your tasks are sent to.
• The instructions that your workforce receives. This is specified using a worker task template.
• Where your output data is stored.

See the following code:

create_workflow_definition_response = sagemaker_client.create_flow_definition(
        FlowDefinitionName= flowDefinitionName,
        RoleArn= role,
        HumanLoopConfig= {
            "WorkteamArn": WORKTEAM_ARN,
            "HumanTaskUiArn": humanTaskUiArn,
            "TaskCount": 1,
            "TaskDescription": "Review the model predictions and determine if you agree or disagree. Assign a label of 1 to indicate malignant result or 0 to indicate a benign result based on your review of the inference request",
            "TaskTitle": "Using Model Monitor and A2I Demo"
        },
        OutputConfig={
            "S3OutputPath" : OUTPUT_PATH
        }
    )
flowDefinitionArn = create_workflow_definition_response['FlowDefinitionArn'] # let's save this ARN for future use

Setting trigger conditions for human loop activation

We need to send the prediction results that are distributed with output probabilities of over 10% and under 90% (because the model can’t predict with sufficient confidence in this range). We use this as our activation condition, as shown in the following code:

# assign our original test dataset 
model_data_categorical = test_data[list(test_data.columns)[1:]]  

LOWER_THRESHOLD = 0.1
UPPER_THRESHOLD = 0.9
small_payload_df = model_data_categorical.head(len(predictions))
small_payload_df['prediction_prob'] = predictions
small_payload_df_res = small_payload_df.loc[
    (small_payload_df['prediction_prob'] > LOWER_THRESHOLD) &
    (small_payload_df['prediction_prob'] < UPPER_THRESHOLD)
]
print(small_payload_df_res.shape)
small_payload_df_res.head(10)

Starting a human loop

A human loop starts your human review workflow and sends data review tasks to human workers. See the following code:

# Activate human loops
import json
humanLoopName = str(uuid.uuid4())

start_loop_response = a2i.start_human_loop(
            HumanLoopName=humanLoopName,
            FlowDefinitionArn=flowDefinitionArn,
            HumanLoopInput={
                "InputContent": json.dumps(ip_content)
            }
        )

The workers in this use case are domain experts that can validate the request features and determine if the result is malignant or benign. The task requires reviewing the model predictions, agreeing or disagreeing, and updating the prediction as 1 for malignant and 0 for benign. The following screenshot shows a sample of tasks received.

The following screenshot shows updated predictions.

For more information about task UI design for tabular datasets, see Using Amazon SageMaker with Amazon Augmented AI for human review of Tabular data and ML predictions.

Checking the status of task completion and human loop

To check the status of the task and the human loop, enter the following code:

completed_human_loops = []
resp = a2i.describe_human_loop(HumanLoopName=humanLoopName)
print(f'HumanLoop Name: {humanLoopName}')
print(f'HumanLoop Status: {resp["HumanLoopStatus"]}')
print(f'HumanLoop Output Destination: {resp["HumanLoopOutput"]}')
print('n')
    
if resp["HumanLoopStatus"] == "Completed":
    completed_human_loops.append(resp)

When the human loop tasks are complete, we inspect the results of the review and the corrections made to prediction results.

You can use the human-labeled output to augment the training dataset for retraining. This keeps the distribution variance within the threshold and prevents data drift, thereby improving model accuracy. For more information about using Amazon A2I outputs for model retraining, see Object detection and model retraining with Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Augmented AI.

Cleaning up

To avoid incurring unnecessary charges, delete the resources used in this walkthrough when not in use, including the following:

• S3 bucket
• Flow definition
• Monitoring schedule
• Endpoint
• Amazon SageMaker notebook instance

Conclusion

This post demonstrated how you can use Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor and Amazon A2I to set up a monitoring schedule for your Amazon SageMaker model endpoints; specify baselines that include constraint thresholds; observe inference traffic; derive insights such as model drift, completeness, and data type violations; and send the low-confidence predictions to a human workflow with labelers to review and update the results. For video presentations, sample Jupyter notebooks, and more information about use cases like document processing, content moderation, sentiment analysis, object detection, text translation, and more, see Amazon A2I Resources.

References

About the Authors

Prem Ranga is an Enterprise Solutions Architect at AWS based out of Houston, Texas. He is part of the Machine Learning Technical Field Community and loves working with customers on their ML and AI journey. Prem is passionate about robotics, is an Autonomous Vehicles researcher, and also built the Alexa-controlled Beer Pours in Houston and other locations.

Jasper Huang is a Technical Writer Intern at AWS and a student at the University of Pennsylvania pursuing a BS and MS in computer science. His interests include cloud computing, machine learning, and how these technologies can be leveraged to solve interesting and complex problems. Outside of work, you can find Jasper playing tennis, hiking, or reading about emerging trends.

Talia Chopra is a Technical Writer in AWS specializing in machine learning and artificial intelligence. She works with multiple teams in AWS to create technical documentation and tutorials for customers using Amazon SageMaker, MxNet, and AutoGluon. In her free time, she enjoys meditating, studying machine learning, and taking walks in nature.

Read More

This guest post was authored by Kazuma Ohara, Director of RENGA Inc., and edited by Yumiko Kanasugi, Solutions Architect at AWS Japan.

RENGA Inc. operates Mansion Note, one of Japan’s most popular condominium review and rating websites, which gets over a million unique visitors per month. Mansion Note provides a service where people can check reviews and rankings of condominiums and apartments all over Japan. People of all positions, such as current residents, former residents, neighbors, experts, real estate agents, and property owners, clarify their positions first and then post and share their candid opinions and reviews about the condominiums. This “wisdom of crowds” is expected to help potential buyers and tenants better imagine their new home before moving in, and can help eliminate regrets such as, “This is different from what I expected,” or, “I should have chosen a different condo.”

The company has a total of six engineers, including myself. Code reviews have been an essential process in our development, because RENGA takes code quality very seriously. The company, however, used to face a challenge in which code review tasks increased in proportion to the quantity of development, which led to an increased burden on reviewers. Also, no matter how many times we reviewed code, some bugs remained unnoticed, so we needed a mechanism to conduct code reviews more exhaustively.

We saw the announcement of Amazon CodeGuru at re:Invent 2019. The moment we learned that CodeGuru is a machine learning (ML)-based code review service, we knew it was exactly the tool we were looking for. At the time of the announcement, we were making significant improvements to our source code, so we thought that CodeGuru Reviewer might help us with that. We decided to adopt the tool, and it pointed out issues that neither our members nor other static analytics tools had ever detected. In this post, I talk about why RENGA decided to adopt CodeGuru, as well as its adoption process.

Maintaining code quality

RENGA was founded in 2012; 2020 marks its 8th anniversary. Although our product is getting mature, we still invest a lot of resources in development so we can extend features quickly. We not only accelerate the development cycle, but also give the same level of priority to maintaining code quality. When extending features, poor quality code adds complexity to the system and can become a technical debt. On the other hand, as long as consistent code quality is maintained, scaling the system doesn’t prevent developers from extending features, because the code itself is simple. Keeping the balance between agility and quality is important, especially for startups that continuously release new features.

RENGA has a two-step code review process. When a developer commits a fix to our remote repository on GitHub and makes a pull request, two senior members review it first. Then I do the final check and merge it into the primary branch (unless I find an issue). We also check the minimum coding rules using Checkstyle during the build phase.

In the past, we had a challenge with the cost and quality of code reviews. As the amount of code increased at RENGA, the burden on reviewers also increased. We spend about 5% of our development time on code reviews, and reviewers spend an additional 1 hour a day on average for code reviews. Code reviews can, however, be a bottleneck when we want to quickly release new features and promptly deliver those values to our users. Also, the more code we need to review, the less accurate it is to identify issues, and some issues may even be overlooked. One solution is to increase reviewers, but that isn’t easy because code reviews require not only extensive business and technical knowledge, but also an understanding of the top modules. So we needed an automated tool that could offload the reviewers’ workload.

Adopting CodeGuru Reviewer

CodeGuru Reviewer is an automated tool that you can seamlessly integrate into your development pipeline, so we found it very easy to adopt the tool. We had high expectations that the tool may not only solve cost issues, but also help us gain insights from a different perspective than humans because the tool is based on ML. The tool was still in the preview stage, but upon being offered a free tier, we decided to try it out.

The following architecture illustrates RENGA’s development pipeline.

Setting up CodeGuru Reviewer is very easy. All you need to do is select a repository on GitHub and associate it with the tool. AWS recommends that you create a new GitHub user for CodeGuru Reviewer before associating a GitHub repository with the tool. CodeGuru Reviewer is enabled after the association is complete.

The following screenshot shows the Associate repository page on the CodeGuru console.

CodeGuru Reviewer is triggered by a pull request. The tool provides recommendations by adding comments to the pull request, usually within 15 minutes after the request is made.

The following text is a recommendation that CodeGuru Reviewer generated:

It is more efficient to directly use Stream::min or Stream::max than Stream::sorted and Stream::findFirst. The former is O(n) in terms of time while the latter is not. Also the former is O(1) and the latter is O(n) in terms of memory.

The part of the code the recommendation pointed out was actually not a bottleneck, but it did help us improve performance. Learning this method has helped our developers code better with more confidence.

The following text is another example of a recommendation from CodeGuru Reviewer:

Consider closing the resource returned by the following method call: newInputStream. Currently, there are execution paths that do not contain closure statements, e.g., when exception is thrown by SampleData.read. Either a) close the object returned by newInputStream() in a try-finally block or b) close the resource by declaring the object returned by newInputStream() in a try-with-resources block.

Although there was no actual resource leakage, we modified the part that was pointed out to clarify that no leakage will occur, which improved the code readability.

After adopting CodeGuru Reviewer, we feel that the product generates fewer recommendations compared to other existing static analytics tools, but it provides highly accurate recommendations with less false-positive advice. Too many recommendations require extra time for triage, so accurate recommendations are a big bonus for busy developers.

Summary

Although the code review process is important, it shouldn’t increase the workload for reviewers and become a bottleneck in development. By adopting CodeGuru Reviewer, we successfully automated code reviews and reduced reviewers’ workloads. Furthermore, learning the best practices of coding—which we weren’t aware of—has helped us develop with more confidence. Going forward, we plan on measuring metrics such as cyclomatic complexity so we can provide higher-quality services to our customers promptly. We also expect that CodeGuru Reviewer will further expand its recommendation items.

About the Authors

Kazuma Ohara is the Director of RENGA Inc., an internet services company headquartered in Japan.

Yumiko Kanasugi is a Solutions Architect with Amazon Web Services Japan, supporting digital native business customers to utilize AWS.

Read More

This post is written in collaboration with DevFactory, an AWS Select Technology Partner.

DevFactory is an enterprise SaaS-focused company that is responsible for innovation, development, and operation of over 120 enterprise products. DevFactory also offers DevGraph, an integrated suite of software development tools built on AWS.

Amazon CodeGuru is an automated code review service that helps developers improve their quality of code by recommending actions in code review. CodeGuru consists of two services:

• Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer – Analyzes code repositories in GitHub and AWS CodeCommit, finds issues, and recommends fixes.
• Amazon CodeGuru Profiler – Visualizes your application performance and shows you the methods that take the most time and CPU capacity to execute. CodeGuru Profiler supports Java and other JVM languages, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (Amazon EKS), AWS Fargate, or on premises.

In this post, we talk about how DevFactory uses CodeGuru Reviewer to improve their software as a service (SaaS) applications.

What is CodeGuru Reviewer?

CodeGuru Reviewer is a code review service that uses a combination of machine learning (ML) and human curation techniques to analyze millions of lines of over 10,000 open-source projects and the Amazon internal code base to learn coding practices. It uses these models to find code issues such as concurrency race conditions, resources leaks, and wasted CPU cycles.

DevFactory’s challenge

DevFactory has more than 120 products and manages over 650 million lines of code. Most of these products were developed over the last two decades and therefore have custom code to implement widely available, off-the-shelf services. To adopt, upgrade, and maintain the code base with a global, fully remote workforce, DevFactory is constantly evolving and adding automation where necessary.

One key part of the strategy is to identify and enhance the gems in each newly acquired product. These are the services, features, and applications that are both unique and valuable to the customers. ML-driven forecasts? Business intelligence from social graphs? Containerization and productivity enhancement at scale? DevFactory wants their engineering teams to deliver these to customers, and leave the undifferentiated heavy lifting to AWS services and infrastructure.

The following table shows DevFactory by the numbers.

In addition to jettisoning undifferentiated code, monitoring and maintaining the existing code base requires effort. DevFactory’s ideal code analysis solution is:

• Accurate and focused – The most valuable code analysis tools are both highly accurate and highly targeted. Static analysis, for example, routinely turns up thousands of issues in perfectly acceptable code bases because it has both false and unimportant positives.
• Specialized – To truly improve the code base, specialized tools were needed to find issues during the following stages:
  • Development – Coding style, correctness, and more
  • Deployment – Efficient use of the right services
  • Implementation – Performance and security
• Up-to-date – Updating to the latest API or SDK can result in unintended consequences. Any code analysis tool needs to keep up with this creative destruction and enforce correct usage of ever-new services.
• Actionable – Code reviews and style guides are helpful, but to operate existing and new products at DevFactory’s scale, they need automated analysis and automated actions. DevFactory values issue-finders that lend themselves to their (rather sophisticated) issue-fixing techniques.

How CodeGuru helps DevFactory

When CodeGuru was first unveiled at re:Invent 2019, DevFactory wanted to try it as soon as possible and enrolled in the early beta program. After running CodeGuru against code base repositories, DevFactory made the following findings:

• CodeGuru is predictably the leader in detecting AWS service misuse and recommending actions, which is worth a lot to anyone relying on AWS services. For DevFactory, CodeGuru flagged syntactically valid code that still produced inaccurate results due to paginated Amazon DynamoDB query results.
• CodeGuru resource leaks and security issue coverage is precise, actionable, and expanding. DevFactory concluded that the 21 issues CodeGuru flagged were much more valuable than the over 500 generic non-issues (and quite a few false positives) other generic tools turned up.
• As a managed service, CodeGuru reduces the burden of finding issues with the issue-finder. For the small team that does diligence on hundreds of repositories each week, reliability is just as important as accuracy.
• CodeGuru Reviewer helped DevFactory rewrite its DevGraph product, FogBugz, in cloud-native format.
• CodeGuru Profiler helped DevFactory optimize its DevGraph product, EngineYard, for its new container-based offering.

Conclusion

CodeGuru, CodeGuru Profiler, and CodeGuru Reviewer are now generally available. For more information about getting started with these services, see the following:

• AWS re:Invent 2019: [NEW LAUNCH!] Introduction to Amazon CodeGuru
• Automate Code Reviews and Application Performance Recommendations with Amazon CodeGuru
• Investigating performance issues with Amazon CodeGuru Profiler
• Optimizing application performance with Amazon CodeGuru Profiler

About the Author

Muhammad Mansoor is a Solutions Architect and part of the AWS team based in New York City. Muhammad has a background in DevOps, Containers, Enterprise Transformation and Cloud Migration. In his spare time he loves to spend time with his family and enjoys running.

Read More

TensorBoard is an open-source toolkit for TensorFlow users that allows you to visualize a wide range of useful information about your model, from model graphs; to loss, accuracy, or custom metrics; to embedding projections, images, and histograms of weights and biases.

This post demonstrates how to use TensorBoard with Amazon SageMaker training jobs, write logs from TensorFlow training scripts to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and ways to run TensorBoard: locally, using Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) on AWS Fargate, or inside of an Amazon SageMaker notebook instance.

Generating training logs using tf.summary

TensorFlow comes with a tf.summary module to write summary data, which it uses for monitoring and visualization. The module’s API provides methods to write scalars, audio, histograms, text, and image summaries, and can trace information that’s useful for profiling training jobs. An example command to write the accuracy of the first step of training looks like the following:

tf.summary.scalar('accuracy', 0.45, step=1)

To use the summary data after the training job is complete, it’s important to write the files to a persistent storage. This way, you can visualize your past jobs or compare different runs during the hyperparameter tuning phase. The tf.summary module allows you to use Amazon S3 as the destination for log files, passing the S3 bucket URI directly into the create_file_writer method. See the following code:

tf.summary.create_file_writer('s3://<bucket_name>/<prefix>')

Keras users can use keras.callbacks.TensorBoard as one of the callbacks provided to the Model.fit() method. This callback provides an abstraction of a low-level tf.summary API and collects a lot of the data automatically. With TensorBoard callbacks, you can collect data to visualize training graphs, metrics plots, activation histograms, and run profiling. See the following code:

tb_callback = tf.keras.callbacks.TensorBoard(log_dir='s3://<bucket_name>/<prefix>')
model.fit(x, y, epochs=5, callbacks=[tb_callback])

For a detailed example of how to collect summary data in the training scripts, see the TensorBoard Keras example notebook on the Amazon SageMaker examples GitHub repo or inside a running Amazon SageMaker notebook instance on the Amazon SageMaker Examples tab. This notebook uses TensorFlow 2.2 and Keras to train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to recognize images from the CIFAR-10 dataset. Code in the notebook runs the training job locally inside the notebook instance one time, and then another 10 times during the hyperparameter tuning job. All training jobs write log files under one Amazon S3 prefix, so the log destination path for every run follows the format s3://<bucket_name>/<project_name>/logs/<training_job_name>, where the project name is tensorboard_keras_cifar10.

The notebook also demonstrates how to run TensorBoard inside of the Amazon SageMaker notebook instance. This method has some limitations; for example, the TensorBoard command blocks the run of the notebook and lives as long as the notebook instance is alive, but allows you to quickly access the dashboard and make sure the training is running correctly.

In the following sections, we look at other ways to run TensorBoard.

Running TensorBoard on your local machine

If you want to run TensorBoard locally, the first thing you need to do is to install TensorFlow:

pip3 install tensorflow

An independent distribution of TensorBoard is also available, but it has limited functionality if run without TensorFlow. For this post, we use TensorBoard as part of the TensorFlow distribution.

Assuming your AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) is installed and configured properly, we simply run TensorBoard pointing to the Amazon S3 directory containing the generated summary data:

AWS_REGION=eu-west-1 tensorboard --logdir s3://<bucket_name>/tensorboard_keras_cifar10/logs/

You must specify the region where your S3 bucket is located. You can find the right region in the list of buckets on the Amazon S3 console.

The user you use must have read access to the specified S3 bucket. For more information about securely granting access to S3 buckets to a specific user, see Writing IAM Policies: How to Grant Access to an Amazon S3 Bucket.

You should see something similar to the following screenshot.

Running TensorBoard on Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate

If you prefer to have an instance of TensorBoard permanently running and accessible to your whole team, you can deploy it as an independent application in the cloud. One of the easiest ways to do this without managing servers is AWS Fargate, a serverless compute engine for containers. The following diagram illustrates this architecture.

You can deploy an example TensorBoard container image with all required roles and an Application Load Balancer by using the provided AWS CloudFormation template:

This template has five input parameters:

• TensorBoard container image – Use tensorflow/tensorflow for a standard distribution or a custom container image if you want to enable the Profiler plugin
• S3Bucket – Enter the name of the bucket where TensorFlow logs are stored
• S3Prefix – Enter the path to the TensorFlow logs inside of the bucket; for example, tensorboard_keras_cifar10/logs/
• VpcId – Select the VPC where you want TensorBoard to be deployed to
• SubnetId – Select two or more subnets in the selected VPC

This example solution doesn’t include authorization and authentication mechanisms. Remember that if you deploy TensorBoard to a publicly accessible subnet, your TensorBoard instance and training logs are accessible to everyone on the internet. You can secure TensorBoard with the following methods:

• Require authorization in the Application Load Balancer settings. For instructions, see Simplify Login with Application Load Balancer Built-in Authentication.
• Deploy TensorBoard into a private subnet and use a VPN to access it. For instructions, see How do I create a secure connection between my office network and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud?

After you create the CloudFormation stack, you can find the link to the deployed TensorBoard on the Outputs tab on the AWS CloudFormation console.

Using a custom TensorBoard container image

Because TensorBoard is part of the TensorFlow distribution, we can use the official tensorflow Docker container image hosted on Docker Hub.

Optionally, we can build a custom image with the optional Profiler TensorBoard plugin to visualize profiling data:

#Dockerfile
FROM tensorflow/tensorflow

RUN python3 -m pip install --upgrade --no-cache-dir tensorboard_plugin_profile

EXPOSE 6006

ENTRYPOINT ["tensorboard"]

You can build and test the container locally:

docker build -t tensorboard .

docker run -p 6006:6006 
    --env AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=XXXXX 
    --env AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=XXXXX 
    --env AWS_REGION=eu-west-1 
tensorboard 
    --logdir s3://bucket_name/tensorboard_keras_cifar10/logs/

After testing the container, you need to push it to a container image repository of your choice. Detailed instructions on deploying an application aren’t in the scope of this post. To set up Amazon ECS and Elastic Load Balancer, see Building, deploying, and operating containerized applications with AWS Fargate.

Conclusion

In this post, I showed you how to use TensorBoard to visualize TensorFlow training jobs using Amazon S3 as storage for the logs. You can use this solution and the example notebooks to build and train a model with Amazon SageMaker and run a hyperparameter tuning job. You can use TensorBoard to compare hyperparameters from different training runs, generate and display confusion matrices for the classifier, and profile and visualize the training job’s performance.

About the Author

Yegor Tokmakov is a solutions architect at AWS, working with startups. Before joining AWS, Yegor was Chief Technology Officer at a healthcare startup based in Berlin and was responsible for architecture and operations, as well as product development and growth of the tech team. Yegor is passionate about novel AI applications and data analytics. You can find him at @yegortokmakov on Twitter.

Read More

Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. To build truly engaging conversational experiences, you need high quality speech recognition and natural language understanding that understands the intent of the customer accurately.

We are excited to announce that Amazon Lex now supports Australian English. With Australian English, you can deliver a robust and localized conversational experience that accurately understands the Australian dialect. You can also respond to users with natural sounding Amazon Polly Australian voices to provide a fully localized conversational experience.

This post shows how you can build a bot with Australian English support and use the pre-defined built-ins to deliver a superior experience to your users.

Building an Amazon Lex bot

This post uses the following conversation to model a bot:

User: I’d like to schedule an appointment for a dishwasher repair.
Agent: Sure, what city are you in?
User: Ballarat.
Agent: Got it. And what’s the serial number?
User: 1234.
Agent: Ok. For that model, I have technicians available next week. When would you prefer to have them visit?
User: Can I get someone on 4/9?
Agent: Sure. You are all set for September 4th.
User: Thanks!

The first step is to build an Amazon Lex bot with intents to manage appointments. The ScheduleAppointment, ModifyAppointment, and CancelAppointment intents provide this capability. You can download a sample bot definition to follow along with this post.

Creating a bot in Australian English

For this post, you will create an Amazon Lex bot called AppointmentBot. Alternatively, you can also import the sample bot directly and skip the bot creation process.

1. Open the AWS console, and make sure you have selected the Asia Pacific (Sydney)/ap-southeast-2 region.
2. Go to the Amazon Lex console. On the Bots tab, choose Create.
3. Select Custom Bot.
4. Enter the Bot name and select English (AU) as Language.
5. Select the Output voice. The list of voices are specific to the language selected for the bot.  
6. Specify Sentiment analysis, Session timeout, and COPPA settings.
7. Choose Create.
8. Once the bot is created, create ScheduleAppointment, ModifyAppointment, and CancelAppointment intents for your bot by adding sample utterances and slot values.
9. Select Build.

At this point, you should have a working Lex bot.

Setting up an Amazon Connect flow

In this section, we deploy the bot in an Amazon Connect Interactive Voice Response (IVR).

Creating your Amazon Connect instance

In this first step, you create your Amazon Connect instance:

1. On the AWS Management Console, choose Amazon Connect.
2. If this is your first Amazon Connect instance, choose Get started; otherwise, choose Add an instance.
3. For Identity management, choose Store users within Amazon Connect.
4. Enter a URL prefix such as test-instance-############, where “############” is your current AWS account number.
5. Choose Next step.
6. For Create an administrator, enter a name, password, and email address.
7. Choose Next step.
8. For Telephony Options, leave both call options selected by default.
9. Choose Next step.
10. For Data storage, choose Next step.
11. Review the settings and choose Create instance.
12. After your instance is created, choose Get started.

Associating your bot with your Amazon Connect instance

Now that you have an Amazon Connect instance, you can claim a phone number, create a contact flow, and integrate with the AppointmentBot Lex bot you created in the prior step. First, associate your bot with your Amazon Connect instance:

1. On the Amazon Connect console, open your instance by choosing the Instance Alias
2. Choose Contact flows.
3. From the drop-down list, choose AppointmentBot. If you don’t see the bot in the list, make sure you have selected the same Region you used when you created your Lex bot.
4. Choose + Add Lex Bot.

Configuring Amazon Connect to work with your bot

Now you can use your bot with Amazon Connect.

1. On the Amazon Connect dashboard, for Step 1, Choose Begin.
2. For your phone number, choose Australia for the country, Direct Dial or Toll Free, and choose a phone number.
3. Choose Next.
4. If you want to test your new phone number, try it on the next screen or choose Skip for now.

For this post, you can skip hours of operation, creating queues, and creating prompts. For more information on these features, see the Amazon Connect Administrator Guide.

5. For Step 5, Create contact flows, choose View contact flows.
6. Choose Create contact flow.
7. Change the name of the contact flow to Manage repairs.
8. From the Set drop-down menu, drag a Set voice card to the contact flow canvas. Open the card and change the Language to “English (Australian)”, choose an available Voice, and choose Save.
9. Drag a connector from the Entry point card to your new Set voice card.
10. From the Interact drop-down menu, drag a Play prompt card to the contact flow canvas.
11. In the Play prompt details, choose Text-to-speech or chat text.
12. In the text box, enter Hi. How can I help? You can schedule or change a repair appointment.
13. Choose Save.
14. Drag a connector from the Set voice card to your new Play prompt card.
15. Drag a Get customer input card to the contact flow canvas.
16. In the Get customer input details, choose Text-to-speech or chat text.
17. In the text box, enter What would you like to do?
18. Choose Amazon Lex, and choose the AppointmentBot bot in the drop-down list.
19. Add each AppointmentBot intent to the contact flow: ScheduleAppointment, ModifyAppointment, CancelAppointment, and Disconnect.
20. Choose Save.
21. Drag a connector from the Play prompt card to the Get customer input
22. Drag a Play prompt card to the contact flow.
23. Choose Text-to-speech or chat text.
24. In the text box, enter Is there anything else I can help you with?
25. Choose Save.
26. Drag connectors for each entry (except for Disconnect) in the Get customer input card to the new Play prompt card.
27. Drag a connector from the new Play prompt card back to the Get customer input card.
28. From the Terminate/Transfer drop-down menu, and drag a Disconnect/Hang up card to the contact flow.
29. Drag a connector from the Disconnect entry in the Get customer input card to the Disconnect/Hang up card.

Your contact flow should look something like the following image.

30. Choose Save to save your contact flow.
31. Choose Publish to make your new contact flow available to your callers.
32. Choose the Dashboard icon from the side menu.
33. Choose Dashboard.
34. Choose View phone numbers.
35. Choose your phone number to edit it, and change the contact flow or IVR to the Manage Repairs contact flow you just created. Choose Save.

Your Amazon Connect instance is now configured to work with your Amazon Lex bot. Try calling the phone number to see how it works.

Conclusion

Conversational experiences are vastly improved when you understand your user’s accent and respond in a style familiar to them. With Australian English support on Amazon Lex, you can now build bots that are better at understanding the Australian English accent. You can also use pre-defined slots to capture local information such as names and cities. Australian English allows you deliver a robust and localized conversational experience to your users in the Australia region. Australian English is available at the same price, and in the same Regions, as US English. You can try Australian English via the console, the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), and the AWS SDKs. Start building your Aussie bot today!

About the Authors

Brian Yost is a Senior Consultant with the AWS Professional Services Conversational AI team. In his spare time, he enjoys mountain biking, home brewing, and tinkering with technology.

Anubhav Mishra is a Product Manager with AWS. He spends his time understanding customers and designing product experiences to address their business challenges.

Read More