Show your work: Automating cloud infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code
I want to share a little piece of work that I recently completed. Hope you enjoy!
What I did
- Using infrastructure-as-code and AWS I built a system that automatically creates testsets for our algorithms every month
- Now, every month a cron job (EventsRule) triggers a piece of code (Lambda) that runs a computational routine (Sagemaker job) that creates the new testset in a new table in our Athena warehouse (Athena table/S3 bucket)
Why I am proud of it
- This was my first time setting up automated infrastructure-as-code and it was a real pain in the ass, but once I got it, it was very satisfying
- I found it particularly interesting to build a new system by piecing together different services of AWS
- It adds repeated business value by automating something we previously did manually
Technical details
Most of the work involved updating our infra-as-code cloudformation.yaml. I had to provision the following new infrastructure:
CreateTestsetLambda(AWS::Serverless::Function): This is the actual code in the form of a lambda that triggers the Sagemaker job usingboto3. We do it this way because currently (as of writing this) there is no way to start a Sagemaker job directly from a lambdaAWSLambdaCreateTestsetLambdaRole(AWS::IAM::Role): This is the role that the lambda needs to get executedAWSSageMakerExecutorRole(AWS::IAM::Role): This is another role that we give to the lambda so that it has rights to start the Sagemaker jobScheduleMonthlyEventsRule(AWS::Events::Rule): This is the cron job that runs triggers the lambda every monthPermissionForEventsRuleToInvokeLambda(AWS::Lambda::Permission): Finally, we need to give the cron job this permission to be allowed to trigger the lambda
That’s it! I have to admit, it was a real pain in the ass sometimes, but once everything started working together it was sooooo satisfying.
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