When you develop Apache Spark–based applications, you might face some additional challenges when dealing with continuous integration and deployment pipelines, such as the following common issues:

• Applications must be tested on real clusters using automation tools (live test)
• Any user or developer must be able to easily deploy and use different versions of both the application and infrastructure to be able to debug, experiment on, and test different functionality.
• Infrastructure needs to be evaluated and tested along with the application that uses it.

In this post, we walk you through a solution that implements a continuous integration and deployment pipeline supported by AWS services. The pipeline offers the following workflow:

• Deploy the application to a QA stage after a commit is performed to the source code.
• Perform a unit test using Spark local mode.
• Deploy to a dynamically provisioned Amazon EMR cluster and test the Spark application on it
• Update the application as an AWS Service Catalog product version, allowing a user to deploy any version (commit) of the application on demand.

Solution overview

The following diagram shows the pipeline workflow.

The solution uses AWS CodePipeline, which allows users to orchestrate and automate the build, test, and deploy stages for application source code. The solution consists of a pipeline that contains the following stages:

• Source: Both the Spark application source code in addition to the AWS CloudFormation template file for deploying the application are committed to version control. In this example, we use AWS CodeCommit. For an example of the application source code, see zip. 

• Build: In this stage, you use Apache Maven both to generate the application .jar binaries and to execute all of the application unit tests that end with *Spec.scala. In this example, we use AWS CodeBuild, which runs the unit tests given that they are designed to use Spark local mode.

• QADeploy: In this stage, the .jar file built previously is deployed using the CloudFormation template included with the application source code. All the resources are created in this stage, such as networks, EMR clusters, and so on. 

• LiveTest: In this stage, you use Apache Maven to execute all the application tests that end with *SpecLive.scala. The tests submit EMR steps to the cluster created as part of the QADeploy step. The tests verify that the steps ran successfully and their results. 

• LiveTestApproval: This stage is included in case a pipeline administrator approval is required to deploy the application to the next stages. The pipeline pauses in this stage until an administrator manually approves the release. 

• QACleanup: In this stage, you use an AWS Lambda function to delete the CloudFormation template deployed as part of the QADeploy stage. The function does not affect any resources other than those deployed as part of the QADeploy stage. 

• DeployProduct: In this stage, you use a Lambda function that creates or updates an AWS Service Catalog product and portfolio. Every time the pipeline releases a change to the application, the AWS Service Catalog product gets a new version, with the commit of the change as the version description. 

Try it out!

Use the provided sample template to get started using this solution. This template creates the pipeline described earlier with all of its stages. It performs an initial commit of the sample Spark application in order to trigger the first release change. To deploy the template, use the following AWS CLI command:

aws cloudformation create-stack  --template-url https://s3.amazonaws.com/aws-bigdata-blog/artifacts/sparkAppDemoForPipeline/emrSparkpipeline.yaml --stack-name emr-spark-pipeline --capabilities CAPABILITY_NAMED_IAM

After the template finishes creating resources, you see the pipeline name on the stack Outputs tab. After that, open the AWS CodePipeline console and select the newly created pipeline.

After a couple of minutes, AWS CodePipeline detects the initial commit applied by the CloudFormation stack and starts the first release.

You can watch how the pipeline goes through the Build, QADeploy, and LiveTest stages until it finally reaches the LiveTestApproval stage.

At this point, you can check the results of the test in the log files of the Build and LiveTest stage jobs on AWS CodeBuild. If you check the CloudFormation console, you see that a new template has been deployed as part of the QADeploy stage.

You can also visit the EMR console and view how the LiveTest stage submitted steps to the EMR cluster.

After performing the review, manually approve the revision on the LiveTestApproval stage by using the AWS CodePipeline console.

After the revision is approved, the pipeline proceeds to use a Lambda function that destroys the resources deployed on the QAdeploy stage. Finally, it creates or updates a product and portfolio in AWS Service Catalog. After the final stage of the pipeline is complete, you can check that the product is created successfully on the AWS Service Catalog console.

You can check the product versions and notice that the first version is the initial commit performed by the CloudFormation template.

You can proceed to share the created portfolio with any users in your AWS account and allow them to deploy any version of the Spark application. You can also perform a commit on the AWS CodeCommit repository. The pipeline is triggered automatically and repeats the pipeline execution to deploy a new version of the product.

To destroy all of the resources created by the stack, make sure all the deployed stacks using AWS Service Catalog or the QAdeploy stage are destroyed. Then, destroy the pipeline template using the following AWS CLI command:

aws cloudformation delete-stack --stack-name emr-spark-pipeline

Conclusion

You can use the sample template and Spark application shared in this post and adapt them for the specific needs of your own application. The pipeline can have as many stages as needed and it can be used to automatically deploy to AWS Service Catalog or a production environment using CloudFormation.

If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below.

Additional Reading

Learn how to implement authorization and auditing on Amazon EMR using Apache Ranger.

About the Authors

Luis Caro is a Big Data Consultant for AWS Professional Services. He works with our customers to provide guidance and technical assistance on big data projects, helping them improving the value of their solutions when using AWS.

Samuel Schmidt is a Big Data Consultant for AWS Professional Services. He works with our customers to provide guidance and technical assistance on big data projects, helping them improving the value of their solutions when using AWS.