IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service (IKS) and Red Hat OpenShift (with Kustomize)

Overview

This guide installs Feast on an existing IBM Cloud Kubernetes cluster or Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud , and ensures the following services are running:

  • Feast Core

  • Feast Online Serving

  • Postgres

  • Redis

  • Kafka (Optional)

  • Feast Jupyter (Optional)

  • Prometheus (Optional)

1. Prerequisites

  1. IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service or Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud

  2. Install Kubectl that matches the major.minor versions of your IKS or Install the OpenShift CLI that matches your local operating system and OpenShift cluster version.

  3. Install Helm 3

  4. Install Kustomize

2. Preparation

IBM Cloud Block Storage Setup (IKS only)

:warning: If you have Red Hat OpenShift Cluster on IBM Cloud skip to this section.

By default, IBM Cloud Kubernetes cluster uses IBM Cloud File Storage based on NFS as the default storage class, and non-root users do not have write permission on the volume mount path for NFS-backed storage. Some common container images in Feast, such as Redis, Postgres, and Kafka specify a non-root user to access the mount path in the images. When containers are deployed using these images, the containers fail to start due to insufficient permissions of the non-root user creating folders on the mount path.

IBM Cloud Block Storage allows for the creation of raw storage volumes and provides faster performance without the permission restriction of NFS-backed storage

Therefore, to deploy Feast we need to set up IBM Cloud Block Storage as the default storage class so that you can have all the functionalities working and get the best experience from Feast.

  1. Follow the instructions to install the Helm version 3 client on your local machine.

  2. Add the IBM Cloud Helm chart repository to the cluster where you want to use the IBM Cloud Block Storage plug-in.

     helm repo add iks-charts https://icr.io/helm/iks-charts
 helm repo update

  3. Install the IBM Cloud Block Storage plug-in. When you install the plug-in, pre-defined block storage classes are added to your cluster.

     helm install v2.0.2 iks-charts/ibmcloud-block-storage-plugin -n kube-system

    Example output:

    NAME: v2.0.2
LAST DEPLOYED: Fri Feb  5 12:29:50 2021
NAMESPACE: kube-system
STATUS: deployed
REVISION: 1
NOTES:
Thank you for installing: ibmcloud-block-storage-plugin.   Your release is named: v2.0.2
 ...

  4. Verify that all block storage plugin pods are in a "Running" state.

     kubectl get pods -n kube-system | grep ibmcloud-block-storage

  5. Verify that the storage classes for Block Storage were added to your cluster.

     kubectl get storageclasses | grep ibmc-block

  6. Set the Block Storage as the default storageclass.

     kubectl patch storageclass ibmc-block-gold -p '{"metadata": {"annotations":{"storageclass.kubernetes.io/is-default-class":"true"}}}'
 kubectl patch storageclass ibmc-file-gold -p '{"metadata": {"annotations":{"storageclass.kubernetes.io/is-default-class":"false"}}}'

 # Check the default storageclass is block storage
 kubectl get storageclass | grep \(default\)

    Example output:

     ibmc-block-gold (default)   ibm.io/ibmc-block   65s

    Security Context Constraint Setup (OpenShift only)

By default, in OpenShift, all pods or containers will use the Restricted SCC which limits the UIDs pods can run with, causing the Feast installation to fail. To overcome this, you can allow Feast pods to run with any UID by executing the following:

oc adm policy add-scc-to-user anyuid -z default,kf-feast-kafka -n feast

3. Installation

Install Feast using kustomize. The pods may take a few minutes to initialize.

git clone https://github.com/kubeflow/manifests
cd manifests/contrib/feast/
kustomize build feast/base | kubectl apply -n feast -f -

Optional: Enable Feast Jupyter and Kafka

You may optionally enable the Feast Jupyter component which contains code examples to demonstrate Feast. Some examples require Kafka to stream real time features to the Feast online serving. To enable, edit the following properties in the values.yaml under the manifests/contrib/feast folder:

kafka.enabled: true
feast-jupyter.enabled: true

Then regenerate the resource manifests and deploy:

make feast/base
kustomize build feast/base | kubectl apply -n feast -f -

4. Use Feast Jupyter Notebook Server to connect to Feast

After all the pods are in a RUNNING state, port-forward to the Jupyter Notebook Server in the cluster:

kubectl port-forward \
$(kubectl get pod -l app=feast-jupyter -o custom-columns=:metadata.name) 8888:8888 -n feast
Forwarding from 127.0.0.1:8888 -> 8888
Forwarding from [::1]:8888 -> 8888

You can now connect to the bundled Jupyter Notebook Server at localhost:8888 and follow the example Jupyter notebook.

5. Uninstall Feast

kustomize build feast/base | kubectl delete -n feast -f -

6. Troubleshooting

When running the minimal_ride_hailing_example Jupyter Notebook example the following errors may occur:

  1. When running job = client.get_historical_features(...):

     KeyError: 'historical_feature_output_location'

    or

     KeyError: 'spark_staging_location'

    Add the following environment variable:

     os.environ["FEAST_HISTORICAL_FEATURE_OUTPUT_LOCATION"] = "file:///home/jovyan/historical_feature_output"
 os.environ["FEAST_SPARK_STAGING_LOCATION"] = "file:///home/jovyan/test_data"

  2. When running job.get_status()

     <SparkJobStatus.FAILED: 2>

    Add the following environment variable:

     os.environ["FEAST_REDIS_HOST"] = "feast-release-redis-master"

  3. When running job = client.start_stream_to_online_ingestion(...)

     org.apache.kafka.vendor.common.KafkaException: Failed to construct kafka consumer

    Add the following environment variable:

     os.environ["DEMO_KAFKA_BROKERS"] = "feast-release-kafka:9092"
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