Kenza

Kenza is an open-source Machine Learning Platform.

More specifically, it is an open source cloud-native (moving from Docker Swarm to Kubernetes in 2020) system for Machine Learning Continuous Integration and Delivery (CD4ML) you can run in one command. It leverages containers and the cloud to provide basic mechanisms for training, tuning and deploying Machine Learning models.

What ML Engines does it support?

• AWS SageMaker
• More to be added soon

What does it provide to Data Scientists?

• A web UI where you can track and compare your training and hyperparameter tuning jobs, and model deployments

How does a Data Scientist use it?

• It's very simple! You need to implement a train and predict functionality in Python, and define a YAML file. Example:

    sagify:
    
    train:
      input_s3_dir: s3://kenza-ds-demo/iris-data/iris.data
      output_s3_dir: s3://kenza-training-models
      hyperparameters_file: hyperparameters.json
      ec2_type: ml.m5.large
      volume_size: 50
      timeout: 86400
      metrics: Accuracy
      
      deploy:
        instances_count: 1
        ec2_type: ml.t2.medium
        endpoint: some-endpoint
  

Why a Machine Learning team should care?

• Focus on Machine Learning, not ML Ops
• Continuous and Reliable training, hyperparameter tuning and deployment
• Version control of ML models
• Shorter time to put a model in production
• No need to spend months to change your current ML codebase to meet the needs of this ML platform
• Integrates easily with existing software engineering best practices
• Less resources invested on ML Infrastructure Engineers

Why a Machine Learning Infrastructure team should care?

• Clean open-source ML Platform
• Customize it as you wish
• Shorter time to deliver
• Easy to integrate with existing Engineering processes
• Support of many ML Engines (at the moment only AWS SageMaker)

The best part is that you can continue using your favorite libraries!

Go to https://kenza-ai.github.io/kenza/, install Kenza and follow the steps in Getting started for Data Scientists and ML Infrastructure Engineers

Installation

Download the binary from the latest GitHub release:

# Linux
curl -L https://github.com/kenza-ai/kenza/releases/download/v0.0.1-alpha/kenza_0.0.1-alpha_linux_amd64 -o kenza

# macOS
curl -L https://github.com/kenza-ai/kenza/releases/download/v0.0.1-alpha/kenza_0.0.1-alpha_darwin_amd64 -o kenza

Move it under a PATH directory, we prefer /usr/local/bin:

chmod +x kenza
sudo mv ./kenza /usr/local/bin/kenza

Ensure you are on the expected version:

kenza info

You should see output similar to the following:

Kenza info

Version: v0.0.32
Built:   2019-12-09T18:57:05Z
Commit:  099415b5087d919d086b383da73afe1b99bf5k0a

Getting Started

Starting Kenza

To start (or restart Kenza) run:

kenza start

Note: The first run might take longer than subsequent runs due to the Docker images downloading for the first time.

Important: The directory from which the kenza commands are run from is significant. kenza start creates a kenza directory in the directory the command was run from. If you run the command again in a different directory, a new kenza directory will be created there, essentially a separate kenza installation.

After Kenza has started, it will attempt to navigate you to http://localhost/#/signup to create an account and get you started.

Checking current service status

You can check the status of Kenza and its services with:

kenza status

If the output feels familiar, it's because Kenza is deployed as a Docker stack. Running docker stack ps kenza would generate the same output.

Scaling down/up

Kenza runs "one job per worker"; workers are ephemeral in nature and only handle one job before shutting down. To run more than one jobs in parallel, simply add more workers:

kenza scale worker=5

Note: Kenza workers do not need nearly as many resources as one may think (due to the nature of ML jobs) because the actual training takes place on the cloud. Kenza workers only clone the repos, prepare the job commands to be run and report on the status of the jobs as they progress through their lifetime.

Cleaning up

You can stop Kenza without any data loss with:

kenza stop

Updating Kenza

To update to the latest available version, run:

kenza update

Note: Currently, this only updates the Kenza executable, future work will stop Kenza, apply all necessary changes and restart the system to ensure all services are brought up to their latest versions, migrations are performed etc. For now, please run kenza stop before updating.

Running Kenza on the Cloud

Provisioning resources

Kenza leverages containers (currently orchestrated with Docker Swarm, moving to Kubernetes in 2020) to run on the cloud. Before starting Kenza, the required resources (manager server(s) / instances, security groups etc) need to be provisioned first.

Ensure your local AWS access levels (the profile or role you will be using when running kenza provision commands) meet the IAM policy requirements for deploying a Docker Machine.

To provision a machine with the default values on AWS, run:

kenza provision --driver amazonec2 --amazonec2-iam-instance-profile your-sagemaker-aware-intance-profile kenza-machine-1

Any other options you pass will be honored; all options are passed as-is to the corresponding docker-machine command. One would pass additional options to use a pre-existing VPC or Security Group to limit access to the instance to a specific office IP range for example. The full list of options available can be found here.

You can use any name for the Docker Machine (kenza-machine-1 in the example above) but the only driver supported for now is "amazonec2".

Note: It is highly recommended that the role assigned to the Kenza manager instance follows the Principle of Least Privilege and only provides access to the services and resources that will actually be needed. To identify the exact permissions needed for your use cases use this AWS reference specific to SageMaker. If unsure, AWS has been aggressively adding tools to make control of roles' more manageable. There are also open-source Least Privilege Policy generators like Saleforce's Policy Centry you can use to ensure permissions are only as elevated as needed.

Run docker machine ls to verify the machine you just created is available.

You can also check the EC2 Dashboard on your AWS account for the various resources created (e.g. an instance and a key pair matching the "name" parameter provided earlier to the provision command, the "docker-machine" security group and others).

To deploy Kenza on the newly created resources, we first need to ensure the Docker Machine we just created is active. To do this, run (substituting if needed kenza-machine-1 with the name you provided to the provision command):

eval $(kenza env kenza-machine-1)

Verify Docker is now actually "forwarding all calls" to the remote machine:

docker-machine active

With the machine set up, all Kenza commands will now be run against the newly deployed infrastructure, not your local machine.

To start Kenza on EC2, simply run (substituting if needed kenza-machine-1 with the name you provided to the provision command):

kenza start --name kenza-machine-1 --github-secret webhooks-secret --apikey a-randomly-generated-key

After Kenza starts, it will open your default browser to the URL / Public IP of the machine where the Kenza web app can be reached.

Once launched, you can associate your instance with a static IP or a domain name.

Troubleshooting

Getting detailed service execution details

You can observe detailed log output for a service with:

kenza logs service_name

You can stop an individual service with:

kenza stop service_name

Valid service names:

• db
• api
• web
• worker
• pubsub
• progress
• scheduler

Restarting Kenza

Restarting Kenza or Docker can sometimes help when Docker Swarm seems to be "stuck".

For any other issue, please raise an issue.

Component Overview

Kenza is composed of the following components:

• API - Service called by all other services, including the cli, to read / mutate Kenza related data (projects, jobs, schedules etc).

Note for contributors: API is the only service with direct access / dependency to the Kenza data store(s). All other services MUST go through the API.

• Web - React.js web application, the Kenza UI.

• Worker - Worker nodes, the container tasks actually running the jobs. Workers are ephemeral and strictly process one job and one job only before shutting themselves down.

• Progress - Listens for job updates published by the worker nodes and propagates them to the API.

• Scheduler - Listens for job arrivals (on-demand, webhooks and scheduled jobs) and schedules them accordingly to be picked up by workers for processing.

• PubSub - RabbitMQ exchanges and queues, used for async comms among services.

• DB - The kenza data store (currently Postgres). It can be a Postgres container (default option, provided by Kenza as a container) or an external resource e.g. an AWS RDS, Heroku or on-prem installation.

• CLI - The Kenza command line utility. Think kubectl, systemctl.

Kenza currently supports Docker Swarm environments. Support for Kubernetes is being added in 2020.

Kenza UI

The Kenza web application is a ReactJS / Redux Single Page Application (SPA). You can use the standard tooling e.g. React Tools (Chrome, Firefox) to troubleshoot / report issues with specific browsers.

Note on tests (or lack thereof)

Kenza was originally built as a typical cloud based pipeline on AWS; tests will be being moved as they are getting adapted to the container-based world, probably starting with the ones that are the least impacted by the move e.g. the UI / web app.