Polling AWS parameter store - amazon-web-services

I'm planning to use the parameter store to have some dynamic config (property) that will programmatically get updated. The apps using this config will poll for the change every 5 minutes. Is this a good use case to use a parameter store? The config is expected to be updated once in a month or so and read like 10 times every 5 minutes. The rate at which it is being read is not expected to increase.

Parameter Store is an event source for cloudwatch events. It would be better to try and use cloudwatch events to trigger a lambda to update config that these apps depend on.
Source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/organize-parameters-by-hierarchy-tags-or-amazon-cloudwatch-events-with-amazon-ec2-systems-manager-parameter-store/

It sound like your situation is:
A config is being used by multiple apps
The config could update at any time (but not very often)
The apps should use the latest config
If the apps need to use the latest config at all times, then the only reliable method is to check the config before every use. If you are willing to allow some leniency, then they could update at regular intervals rather than every time the config is required.
There are several places the config could be stored:
In a database
In an Amazon S3 object
In Parameter Store (as you have suggested)
Assuming that you are using a standard parameter (not an Advanced parameter), then there is no charge for the API calls nor the storage. Thus, using Parameter Store seems perfectly valid if it meets your requirements.

The AWS Documents states the below, so I'd say it depends on what else you're using the Parameter Store for, but you're way off the 40 requests per second.
Max throughput (transactions per second)
Default throughput: 40 (Shared by the following API actions: GetParameter, GetParameters, GetParametersByPath)
Higher throughput: 100 (GetParametersByPath)
Higher throughput: 3000 (Shared by the following API actions: GetParameter and GetParameters)

Related

How can I get AWS lambda usage for the last hour?

I would like to know if there is a way to get all of my lambda invocation usages for the last 1 hour (better if every 5 minutes).
It could also be nice to get the cost usage (but from what I've read it only updates once a day).
From looking at the documentation it seems like I can use GetMetricData (Cloudwatch), is there a better one for my use case?
You can get this information by region within CloudWatch metrics.
In the AWS/Lambda namespace is a metric named Invocations, this can be viewed for the entire region or on a per Lambda basis.
If you look at the Sum per whichever period you want to use (you can get down to per 1 minute values for this metric), you will be able to get these values in near real-time.
You can get these values from within the console or by using the get-metric-data command within the CLI or SDK.
There are many tools to get metrics on your lambda, so it really depends on your needs.
What do you mean by "is there a better one for my use case"?
If you prefer, you can check it through the console: Go to cloudwatch -> metrics -> and navigate to your lambda. You can aggregate the data differently (examples: average per 5 minutes, or total a day, etc.)
Here's a great doc: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/monitoring-metrics.html#monitoring-metrics-invocation
Moreover, here's a solution that I gave that surveys different approaches to monitor lambda resources: Best Way to Monitor Customer Usage of AWS Lambda
Disclosoure: I work for Lumigo, a company that does exactly that.

How to process files serially in cloud function?

I have written a cloud storage trigger based cloud function. I have 10-15 files landing at 5 secs interval in cloud bucket which loads data into a bigquery table(truncate and load).
While there are 10 files in the bucket I want cloud function to process them in sequential manner i.e 1 file at a time as all the files accesses the same table for operation.
Currently cloud function is getting triggered for multiple files at a time and it fails in BIgquery operation as multiple files trying to access the same table.
Is there any way to configure this in cloud function??
Thanks in Advance!
You can achieve this by using pubsub, and the max instance param on Cloud Function.
Firstly, use the notification capability of Google Cloud Storage and sink the event into a PubSub topic.
Now you will receive a message every time that a event occur on the bucket. If you want to filter on file creation only (object finalize) you can apply a filter on the subscription. I wrote an article on this
Then, create an HTTP functions (http function is required if you want to apply a filter) with the max instance set to 1. Like this, only 1 function can be executed in the same time. So, no concurrency!
Finally, create a PubSub subscription on the topic, with a filter or not, to call your function in HTTP.
EDIT
Thanks to your code, I understood what happens. In fact, BigQuery is a declarative system. When you perform a request or a load job, a job is created and it works in background.
In python, you can explicitly wait the end on the job, but, with pandas, I didn't find how!!
I just found a Google Cloud page to explain how to migrate from pandas to BigQuery client library. As you can see, there is a line at the end
# Wait for the load job to complete.
job.result()
than wait the end of the job.
You did it well in the _insert_into_bigquery_dwh function but it's not the case in the staging _insert_into_bigquery_staging one. This can lead to 2 issues:
The dwh function work on the old data because the staging isn't yet finish when you trigger this job
If the staging take, let's say, 10 seconds and run in "background" (you don't wait the end explicitly in your code) and the dwh take 1 seconds, the next file is processed at the end of the dwh function, even if the staging one continue to run in background. And that leads to your issue.
The architecture you describe isn't the same as the one from the documentation you linked. Note that in the flow diagram and the code samples the storage events triggers the cloud function which will stream the data directly to the destination table. Since BigQuery allow for multiple streaming insert jobs several functions could be executed at the same time without problems. In your use case the intermediate table used to load with write-truncate for data cleaning makes a big difference because each execution needs the previous one to finish thus requiring a sequential processing approach.
I would like to point out that PubSub doesn't allow to configure the rate at which messages are sent, if 10 messages arrive to the topic they all will be sent to the subscriber, even if processed one at a time. Limiting the function to one instance may lead to overhead for the above reason and could increase latency as well. That said, since the expected workload is 15-30 files a day the above maybe isn't a big concern.
If you'd like to have parallel executions you may try creating a new table for each message and set a short expiration deadline for it using table.expires(exp_datetime) setter method so that multiple executions don't conflict with each other. Here is the related library reference. Otherwise the great answer from Guillaume would completely get the job done.

"Realtime" syncing of large numbers of log files to S3

I have a large number of logfiles from a service that I need to regularly run analysis on via EMR/Hive. There are thousands of new files per day, and they can technically come out of order relative to the file name (e.g. a batch of files comes a week after the date in the file name).
I did an initial load of the files via Snowball, then set up a script that syncs the entire directory tree once per day using the 'aws s3 sync' cli command. This is good enough for now, but I will need a more realtime solution in the near future. The issue with this approach is that it takes a very long time, on the order of 30 minutes per day. And using a ton of bandwidth all at once! I assume this is because it needs to scan the entire directory tree to determine what files are new, then sends them all at once.
A realtime solution would be beneficial in 2 ways. One, I can get the analysis I need without waiting up to a day. Two, the network use would be lower and more spread out, instead of spiking once a day.
It's clear that 'aws s3 sync' isn't the right tool here. Has anyone dealt with a similar situation?
One potential solution could be:
Set up a service on the log-file side that continuously syncs (or aws s3 cp) new files based on the modified date. But wouldn't that need to scan the whole directory tree on the log server as well?
For reference, the log-file directory structure is like:
/var/log/files/done/{year}/{month}/{day}/{source}-{hour}.txt
There is also a /var/log/files/processing/ directory for files being written to.
Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!
You could have a Lambda function triggered automatically as a new object is saved on your S3 bucket. Check Using AWS Lambda with Amazon S3 for details. The event passed to the Lambda function will contain the file name, allowing you to target only the new files in the syncing process.
If you'd like wait until you have, say 1,000 files, in order to sync in batch, you could use AWS SQS and the following workflow (using 2 Lambda functions, 1 CloudWatch rule and 1 SQS queue):
S3 invokes Lambda whenever there's a new file to sync
Lambda stores the filename in SQS
CloudWatch triggers another Lambda function every X minutes/hours to check how many files are there in SQS for syncing. Once there's 1,000 or more, it retrieves those filenames and run the syncing process.
Keep in mind that Lambda has a hard timeout of 5 minutes. If you sync job takes too long, you'll need to break it in smaller chunks.
You could set the bucket up to log HTTP requests to a separate bucket, then parse the log to look for newly created files and their paths. One troublespot, as well as PUT requests, you have to look for the multipart upload ops which are a sequence of POSTs. Best to log for a few days to see what gets created before putting any effort in to this approach

AWS Kinesis Lambda Scheduled Pull Invocation

There seems to be no way to tell lambdas to pull records in a scheduled manner.
This means that my lambda function never gets invoked unless the size of records meets the batch specification.
I'd like to my lambda function to get invoked eagerly so that it can pull records after a specified time elapses as well.
Imagine that you are building a real time analytics service that do not fill the specified batch size for a long time during off-peaks.
Is there any workaround to pull records periodically?
This means that my lambda function never gets invoked unless the size of records meets the batch specification.
That is not correct to my knowledge - can you provide the documentation that says so?
To my knowledge
AWS uses a daemon for polling the stream and check for new records. The daemon is what triggers the Lambda and it happens in one of the two cases:
Batch size crossed the specified limit (the one configured in Lambda).
Certain time had passed (don't know how much exactly) and current batch is not empty.
I had done a massive use of Kinesis and Lambda, I have configured the batch limit to 500 records (per invocation).
I have had invocations with less than 500 records, sometimes even ~20 records - this is a fact.

How long does it take for AWS S3 to save and load an item?

S3 FAQ mentions that "Amazon S3 buckets in all Regions provide read-after-write consistency for PUTS of new objects and eventual consistency for overwrite PUTS and DELETES." However, I don't know how long it takes to get eventual consistency. I tried to search for this but couldn't find an answer in S3 documentation.
Situation:
We have a website consists of 7 steps. When user clicks on save in each step, we want to save a json document (contains information of all 7 steps) to Amazon S3. Currently we plan to:
Create a single S3 bucket to store all json documents.
When user saves step 1 we create a new item in S3.
When user saves step 2-7 we override the existing item.
After user saves a step and refresh the page, he should be able to see the information he just saved. i.e. We want to make sure that we always read after write.
The full json document (all 7 steps completed) is around 20 KB.
After users clicked on save button we can freeze the page for some time and they cannot make other changes until save is finished.
Question:
How long does it take for AWS S3 to save and load an item? (We can freeze our website when document is being saved to S3)
Is there a function to calculate save/load time based on item size?
Is the save/load time gonna be different if I choose another S3 region? If so which is the best region for Seattle?
I wanted to add to #error2007s answers.
How long does it take for AWS S3 to save and load an item? (We can freeze our website when document is being saved to S3)
It's not only that you will not find the exact time anywhere - there's actually no such thing exact time. That's just what "eventual consistency" is all about: consistency will be achieved eventually. You can't know when.
If somebody gave you an upper bound for how long a system would take to achieve consistency, then you wouldn't call it "eventually consistent" anymore. It would be "consistent within X amount of time".
The problem now becomes, "How do I deal with eventual consistency?" (instead of trying to "beat it")
To really find the answer to that question, you need to first understand what kind of consistency you truly need, and how exactly the eventual consistency of S3 could affect your workflow.
Based on your description, I understand that you would write a total of 7 times to S3, once for each step you have. For the first write, as you correctly cited the FAQs, you get strong consistency for any reads after that. For all the subsequent writes (which are really "replacing" the original object), you might observe eventual consistency - that is, if you try to read the overwritten object, you might get the most recent version, or you might get an older version. This is what is referred to as "eventual consistency" on S3 in this scenario.
A few alternatives for you to consider:
don't write to S3 on every single step; instead, keep the data for each step on the client side, and then only write 1 single object to S3 after the 7th step. This way, there's only 1 write, no "overwrites", so no "eventual consistency". This might or might not be possible for your specific scenario, you need to evaluate that.
alternatively, write to S3 objects with different names for each step. E.g., something like: after step 1, save that to bruno-preferences-step-1.json; then, after step 2, save the results to bruno-preferences-step-2.json; and so on, then save the final preferences file to bruno-preferences.json, or maybe even bruno-preferences-step-7.json, giving yourself the flexibility to add more steps in the future. Note that the idea here to avoid overwrites, which could cause eventual consistency issues. Using this approach, you only write new objects, you never overwrite them.
finally, you might want to consider Amazon DynamoDB. It's a NoSQL database, you can securely connect to it directly from the browser or from your server. It provides you with replication, automatic scaling, load distribution (just like S3). And you also have the option to tell DynamoDB that you want to perform strongly consistent reads (the default is eventually consistent reads; you have to change a parameter to get strongly consistent reads). DynamoDB is typically used for "small" records, 20kB is definitely within the range -- the maximum size of a record would be 400kB as of today. You might want to check this out: DynamoDB FAQs: What is the consistency model of Amazon DynamoDB?
How long does it take for AWS S3 to save and load an item? (We can freeze our website when document is being saved to S3)
You will not find the exact time anywhere. If you ask AWS they will give you approx timings. Your file is 20 KB so as per my experience from S3 usage the time will be more or less 60-90 Sec.
Is there a function to calculate save/load time based on item size?
No there is no any function using which you can calculate this.
Is the save/load time gonna be different if I choose another S3 region? If so which is the best region for Seattle?
For Seattle US West Oregon Will work with no problem.
You can also take a look at this experiment for comparison https://github.com/andrewgaul/are-we-consistent-yet