Azure AKS (with Helm)

Overview

This guide installs Feast on Azure Kubernetes cluster (known as AKS), and ensures the following services are running:

  • Feast Core

  • Feast Online Serving

  • Postgres

  • Redis

  • Spark

  • Kafka

  • Feast Jupyter (Optional)

  • Prometheus (Optional)

1. Requirements

  1. Install and configure Azure CLI

  2. Install and configure Kubectl

  3. Install Helm 3

2. Preparation

Create an AKS cluster with Azure CLI. The detailed steps can be found here, and a high-level walk through includes:

az group create --name myResourceGroup  --location eastus
az acr create --resource-group myResourceGroup  --name feast-AKS-ACR --sku Basic
az aks create -g myResourceGroup  -n feast-AKS --location eastus --attach-acr feast-AKS-ACR --generate-ssh-keys

az aks install-cli
az aks get-credentials --resource-group myResourceGroup  --name  feast-AKS

Add the Feast Helm repository and download the latest charts:

helm version # make sure you have the latest Helm installed
helm repo add feast-charts https://feast-helm-charts.storage.googleapis.com
helm repo update

Feast includes a Helm chart that installs all necessary components to run Feast Core, Feast Online Serving, and an example Jupyter notebook.

Feast Core requires Postgres to run, which requires a secret to be set on Kubernetes:

kubectl create secret generic feast-postgresql --from-literal=postgresql-password=password

3. Feast installation

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

helm install feast-release feast-charts/feast

4. Spark operator installation

Follow the documentation to install Spark operator on Kubernetes , and Feast documentation to configure Spark roles

helm repo add spark-operator https://googlecloudplatform.github.io/spark-on-k8s-operator 
helm install my-release spark-operator/spark-operator  --set serviceAccounts.spark.name=spark --set image.tag=v1beta2-1.1.2-2.4.5

and ensure the service account used by Feast has permissions to manage Spark Application resources. This depends on your k8s setup, but typically you'd need to configure a Role and a RoleBinding like the one below:

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
kind: Role
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1beta1
metadata:
  name: use-spark-operator
  namespace: <REPLACE ME>
rules:
- apiGroups: ["sparkoperator.k8s.io"]
  resources: ["sparkapplications"]
  verbs: ["create", "delete", "deletecollection", "get", "list", "update", "watch", "patch"]
---
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1beta1
kind: RoleBinding
metadata:
  name: use-spark-operator
  namespace: <REPLACE ME>
roleRef:
  kind: Role
  name: use-spark-operator
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
subjects:
  - kind: ServiceAccount
    name: default
EOF

5. Use Jupyter 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 -o custom-columns=:metadata.name | grep jupyter) 8888:8888
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.

http://localhost:8888/tree?localhost

6. Environment variables

If you are running the Minimal Ride Hailing Example, you may want to make sure the following environment variables are correctly set:

demo_data_location = "wasbs://<container_name>@<storage_account_name>.blob.core.windows.net/"
os.environ["FEAST_AZURE_BLOB_ACCOUNT_NAME"] = "<storage_account_name>"
os.environ["FEAST_AZURE_BLOB_ACCOUNT_ACCESS_KEY"] = <Insert your key here>
os.environ["FEAST_HISTORICAL_FEATURE_OUTPUT_LOCATION"] = "wasbs://<container_name>@<storage_account_name>.blob.core.windows.net/out/"
os.environ["FEAST_SPARK_STAGING_LOCATION"] = "wasbs://<container_name>@<storage_account_name>.blob.core.windows.net/artifacts/"
os.environ["FEAST_SPARK_LAUNCHER"] = "k8s"
os.environ["FEAST_SPARK_K8S_NAMESPACE"] = "default"
os.environ["FEAST_HISTORICAL_FEATURE_OUTPUT_FORMAT"] = "parquet"
os.environ["FEAST_REDIS_HOST"] = "feast-release-redis-master.default.svc.cluster.local"
os.environ["DEMO_KAFKA_BROKERS"] = "feast-release-kafka.default.svc.cluster.local:9092"

7. Further Reading

PreviousAmazon EKS (with Terraform)NextAzure AKS (with Terraform)

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