metaflow-netflixext 0.2.2

EXPERIMENTAL Metaflow extensions from Netflix

Metaflow Experimental Extensions from Netflix

This repository contains non-supported extensions for Metaflow.

• If you are within Netflix and are looking for the Netflix version of Metaflow, this is not it.
• If you are looking for the community supported Metaflow package, this is also not it, please see here for that package.

Netflix released Metaflow as OSS in 2019. Since then, development of Metaflow internally to Netflix has continued primarily around extensions to better support Netflix's infrastructure and provide a more seamless integration with the compute and orchestration platforms specific to Netflix. Netflix continues to collaboratively improve Metaflow's OSS capabilities in collaboration with OuterBounds and, as such, sometimes develops functionality that is not yet fully ready for inclusion in the community supported Metaflow, either because it is not fully fleshed out or interest in this functionality is not clear. Typically, functionality present here is either deployed actively at Netflix or being tested for deployment at Netflix.

This repository will contain such functionality. While we do our best to ensure that the functionality present works, it does not have the same levels of support and backward compatibility guarantees that Metaflow does. Functionality present in this package is likely to end up in the main Metaflow package with, potentially, some modification (in which case it will be removed from this package) but that is not a guarantee. If you find this functionality useful and would like to see it make it to the main Metaflow package, let us know. Feedback is always welcome!

This extension is currently tested on python 3.7+.

If you have any question, feel free to open an issue here or contact us on the usual Metaflow slack channels.

This extension currently contains:

• refactored Conda decorator

Conda V2

Version 0.2.0 of this extension is not fully backward compatible with previous versions due to where packages are cached. If you are using a previous version of the extension, it is recommended that you change the CONDA_MAGIC_FILE_V2, CONDA_PACKAGES_DIRNAME and CONDA_ENVS_DIRNAME to new values to be able to have both versions active at the same time.

It is likely to evolve primarily in its implementation as we do further testing. Feedback on what is working and what is not is most welcome.

Improvements over the included Conda decorator

This decorator improves several aspects of the included Conda decorator:

• it has significant performance gains:
  • resolving environments in parallel
  • using micromamba for environment creation
• it allows the inclusion of pypi packages in the environment specification
• it has a pure @pip decorator which is a frequently requested feature for metaflow
• it is more efficient in its use of caching
• environment descriptions are also cached allowing anyone to reuse a previously resolved environment
• it provides more visibility into the environments created
• it allows you to recreate the environment used for a step locally to aid in accessing the artifacts produced and/or debug the execution of a step.
• it adds support for named environments allowing you to name environments and share them across your flows and amongst users.

Installation

To use, simply install this package alongside the metaflow package. This package requires Metaflow v2.8.3 or later.

Configuration

You have several configuration options that can be set in metaflow_extensions/netflix_ext/config/mfextinit_netflixext.py. Due to limitations in the OSS implementation of decorators such as batch and kubernetes, you should set these values directly in the mfextinit_netflixext.py configuration file and not in an external configuration or through environment variables. If you do not want to modify the mfextinit_netflixext.py file, you should annotate all your steps using:

@environment(vars={"METAFLOW_CONDA_S3ROOT": "..."})

for any variables that you modify (CONDA_S3ROOT is shown as an example above but you should list any and all variables below that you wish to modify).

The useful configuration values are listed below:

• CONDA_S3ROOT/CONDA_AZUREROOT/CONDA_GSROOT: directory in S3/azure/gs containing all the cached packages and environments as well as eventual conda distributions to use. For safety, do not point this to the same prefix as for the current Conda implementation.
• CONDA_DEPENDENCY_RESOLVER: mamba, conda or micromamba; mamba is recommended as typically faster. micromamba is sometimes a bit more unstable but can be even faster
• CONDA_PIP_DEPENDENCY_RESOLVER: pip or None; if None, you will not be able to resolve environments specifying only pip dependencies.
• CONDA_MIXED_DEPENDENCY_RESOLVER: conda-lock or None; if None, you will not be able to resolve environments specifying a mix of pip and conda dependencies.
• CONDA_REMOTE_INSTALLER_DIRNAME: if set contains a prefix within CONDA_S3ROOT/CONDA_AZUREROOT/CONDA_GSROOT under which micromamba (or other similar executable) are cached. If not specified, micromamba's latest version will be downloaded on remote environments when an environment needs to be re-hydrated.
• CONDA_REMOTE_INSTALLER: if set architecture specific installer in CONDA_REMOTE_INSTALLER_DIRNAME.
• CONDA_LOCAL_DIST_DIRNAME: if set contains a prefix within CONDA_S3ROOT/CONDA_AZUREROOT/CONDA_GSROOT under which fully created conda environments for local execution are cached. If not set, the local machine's Conda installation is used.
• CONDA_PACKAGES_DIRNAME: directory within CONDA_S3ROOT/CONDA_AZUREROOT/CONDA_GSROOT under which cached packages are stored (defaults to packages)
• CONDA_ENVS_DIRNAME: same thing a CONDA_PACKAGES_DIRNAME but for environments (defaults to envs)
• CONDA_LOCAL_DIST: if set architecture specific tar ball in CONDA_LOCAL_DIST_DIRNAME.
• CONDA_LOCAL_PATH: if set, installs the tarball in CONDA_LOCAL_DIST in this path.
• CONDA_PREFERRED_FORMAT: .tar.bz2 or .conda. Prefer .conda for speed gains; any package not available in the preferred format will be transmuted to it automatically. If left empty, whatever package is found will be used (ie: there is no preference)
• CONDA_DEFAULT_PIP_SOURCE: mirror to use for PIP.
• CONDA_USE_REMOTE_LATEST: by default, it is set to :none: which means that if a new environment is not locally known (for example first time resolving it on the machine), it will be re-resolved. You can also set it to :username:, :any: or a comma separated list of usernames to tell Metaflow to go check if there is a cached environment that matches the requested specification that has been resolved previously by either the current user, any user or the set of users.

Azure specific setup

For Azure, you need to do the following two steps once during setup:

• Manually create the blob container specified in CONDA_AZUREROOT
• Grant the Storage Blob Data Contributor role to the storage account to the service principal or user accounts that will be accessing as described here.

Conda environment requirements

Your local conda environment or the cached environment (in CONDA_LOCAL_DIST_DIRNAME) needs to satisfy the following requirements:

• conda
• (optional but recommended) mamba>=1.4.0
• (strongly recommended) micromamba>=1.4.0

Pure pip package support

If you want support for environments containing only pip packages, you will also need:

• pip>=23.0

Mixed (pip + conda) package support

If you want support for environments containing both pip and conda packages, you will also need:

• conda-lock>=2.0.0
• lockfile

Support for .tar.bz2 and .conda packages

If you set CONDA_PREFERRED_FORMAT to either .tar.bz2 or .conda, for some packages, we will need to transmute them from one format to the other. For example if a package is available for download as a .tar.bz2 package but you request .conda packages, the system will transmute (convert) the .tar.bz2 package into one that ends in .conda. To do so, you need to have one of the following package installed:

• conda-package-handling>=1.9.0
• micromamba>=1.4.0 (not supported for cross-platform transmutation due to https://github.com/mamba-org/mamba/issues/2328 or if you are transmuting to .tar.bz2 files).

Also due to a bug in conda and the way we use it, if your resolved environment contains .conda packages and you do not have micromamba installed, the environment creation will fail.

Known issues

This plugin relies on conda, mamba, and micromamba. These technologies are being constantly improved and there are a few outstanding issues that we are aware of:

• if you have an environment with both .conda and .tar.bz2 packages, conda/mamba will fail to create it because we use it in "offline" mode (see: https://github.com/conda/conda/issues/11775). The workaround is to have micromamba available which does not have this issue and which Metaflow will use if it is present
• Transmuting packages with micromamba is not supported for cross-platform transmutes due to https://github.com/mamba-org/mamba/issues/2328. It also does not work properly when transmuting from .conda packages to .tar.bz2 packages. Install conda-package-handling as well to support this.

Uninstallation

Uninstalling this package will revert the behavior of the conda decorator to the one currently present in Metaflow. It is safe to switch back and forth and there should be no conflict between both implementations provided they do not share the same caching prefix in S3/azure/gs and that you do not use any of the new features.

Usage

Your current code with conda decorators will continue working as is. However, at this time, there is no method to "convert" previously resolved environment to this new implementation so the first time you run Metaflow with this package, your previously resolved environments will be ignored and re-resolved.

Environments that can be resolved

Environments listed below are examples that can be resolved using Metaflow. The environments given here are either in the requirements.txt format or environment.yml format and can, for example, be passed to metaflow environment resolve using the -r or -f option respectively. They highlight some of the functionalities present. Note that the same environments can also be specified directly using the @conda or @pip decorators.

Pure "pip" environment with non-python Conda packages

--conda-pkg ffmpeg
ffmpeg-python

The requirements.txt file above will create an environment with the Pip package ffmpeg-python as well as the ffmpeg Conda executable. This is useful to have a pure pip environment (and therefore use the underlying pip ecosystem without conda-lock but still have other non Python packages installed.

Pure "pip" environment with non wheel files

--conda-pkg git-lfs
# Needs LFS to build
transnetv2 @ git+https://github.com/soCzech/TransNetV2.git#main
# GIT repo
clip @ git+https://github.com/openai/CLIP.git@d50d76daa670286dd6cacf3bcd80b5e4823fc8e1
# Source only distribution
outlier-detector==0.0.3
# Local package
foo @ file:///tmp/build_foo_pkg

The above requirements.txt shows that it is possible to specify repositories directly. Note that this does not work cross platform. Behind the scenes, Metaflow will build wheel packages and cache them.

Pip + Conda packages

dependencies:
  - pandas = >=1.0.0
  - pip:
    - tensorflow = 2.7.4
    - apache-airflow[aiobotocore]

The above environment.yml shows that it is possible to mix and match pip and conda packages. You can specify packages using "extras" but you cannot, in this form, specify pip packages that come from git repositories or from your local file-system. Pip packages that are available as wheels or source tar balls are acceptable.

General environment restrictions

In general, the following restrictions are applicable:

• while you can specify Conda channels in the package name (like comet_ml::comet_ml), you cannot, at this time, use this environment as a base for other environments. This restriction will be fixed.
• you cannot specify packages that need to be built from a repository or a directory in mixed conda+pip mode. This is a restriction of the underlying tool (conda-lock) and will not be fixed until supported by conda-lock.
• you cannot specify editable packages. This restriction will not be lifted at this time.
• you cannot specify packages that need to be built from a repository or a directory in pip only mode across platforms (ie: resolving for osx-arm64 from a linux-64 machine). This restriction will not be removed as this would potentially require cross-platform build which can be tricky and error-prone.
• in specifying packages, environment markers are not supported.

Additional decorator options

The conda and conda_base decorators take the following additional options:

• name and pathspec: An environment name or a pathspec to a previously executed step. If specified, no other arguments are allowed. These options allow you to refer to previously resolved environments, either by name or by referencing a step that executed in that environment.
• channels: A list of additional Conda channels to search. This is useful if the channel is not on anaconda.org and cannot be referred to as using the :: notation.
• pip_packages: A dictionary using the same format as the libraries option to specify packages present in pypi.
• pip_sources: A list of additional pypi repositories.

Additional pip decorator

Additional decorators pip and pip_base allow you to specify pure pip-based environments. The arguments to these decorators are python, disabled, sources and packages with the obvious meanings.

You may wonder why the presence of a separate pip decorator when the pip dependencies could be just as easily specified in the conda decorator using the new pip_packages option. There is actually a major difference in how the environments are resolved. There are three cases:

• a pure Conda environment with no pip decorator or packages: in this case, the environment uses conda/mamba to resolve the set of dependencies
• a pure Pip environment with only pip dependencies specified via the pip or pip_base decorators: in this case, a base Python environment is resolved with Conda (containing only python) and pip is then used to resolve all other dependencies.
• a mixed environment with a mixture of pip and conda packages (specified via the conda decorator): in this case, conda-lock is used to resolve the entire environment. conda-lock uses a two phased approach to resolving, first resolving the conda environment and then using poetry to resolve the additional pip packages within the confines of the defined conda environment.

Note that to support a bit more flexibility, you can have a pure Pip environment as well as non-Python conda packages. This is similar to the mixed environment but, in some cases, pip is more flexible than conda-lock in requirement specification (for example, pip supports GIT repositories) so it makes it possible to gain the flexibility of installing non python packages in your environment and still use pip to resolve your python dependencies.

Additional command-line tool

An additional environment command-line tool is available invoked as follows: python myflow.py --environment=conda environment --help. It provides the following two sub-commands:

• resolve: will resolve one or more steps without executing the flow.
• show: will show information about the environments for the flow (whether they exist, need to be resolved, etc.)

Finally, the metaflow command is also augmented with an environment subcommand which has the following sub-commands:

• create: locally creates/instantiates an environment
• resolve: resolves an environment using either a requirements.txt file (for pip only environments) or an environment.yml file (for conda or mixed environments)
• show: shows information about an environment (packages, etc)
• alias: aliases an environment giving it a name so it can be used later
• get: fetches an environment from the remote environment store locally

Supported format for requirements.txt

The requirements.txt file, which can be used to specify a pip only environment, supports the following syntax (a subset of the full syntax supported by pip):

• Comment lines starting with '#'
• --extra-index-url: to spcify an additional repository to look at. Note that to specify the --index-url, set it with the `METAFLOW_CONDA_DEFAULT_PIP_SOURCE environment variable.
• -f, --find-links and --trusted-host: passed directly to pip with the corresponding argument
• --pre, --no-index: passed directly to pip
• --conda-pkg: extension allowing you to specify a conda package that does not need Python
• a requirement specification. This can include GIT repositories or local directories as well as more classic package specification. Constraints and environment markers are not supported.

Note that GIT repositories, local directories and non wheel packages are not compatible with cross-architecture resolution. Metaflow will build the wheel on the fly when resolving the environment and this is only possible if the same architecture is used.

If possible, it is best to specify pre-built packages.

Supported format for environment.yml

The environment.yml format is the same as the one for conda-lock.

Named environments

Environments can optionally be given aliases.

Implicitly, the pathspec to a step that executed with a given Conda environment is an alias for that environment and you can refer to it using that pathspec. For example, if step start in run 456 of MyFlow executed within a certain environment, that environment can be referred to as MyFlow/456/start.

You can also give more generic aliases to environments. A generic alias is simply a string but to simplify naming, we use the Docker tag convention:

• the "name" part of the alias is a "/" separated alphanumerical string
• the "tag" part of the alias is separated from the name with a ":" and consists of an alphanumerical string as well. The "tag" is optional and defaults to "latest" if not specified.

Unlike in Docker, aliases are immutable except for the ones with the tags "latest", "candidate" or "stable".

Technical details

This section dives a bit more in the technical aspects of this implementation.

General Concepts

Environments

An environment can either be un-resolved or resolved. An un-resolved environment is simply defined by the set of high-level user-requirements that the environment must satisfy. Typically, this is a list of Conda and/or Pypi packages and version constraints on them. In our case, we also include the set of channels (Conda) or sources (Pip). A resolved environment contains the concrete list of packages that are to be installed to meet the aforementioned requirements. In a resolved environment, all packages are pinned to a single unique version.

In Metaflow, two hashes identify environments and EnvID (from env_descr.py) encapsulates these hashes:

• the set of user requirements are hashed to produce the first hash, the req_id. This hash encapsulates the packages and version constraints as well as the channels or sources. The packages are sorted to provide a stable hash for identical set of requirements.
• the full set of packages needed are hashed to produce the second hash, the full_id.

We also associate the architecture for which the environment was resolved to form the complete EnvID.

Environments are named as metaflow_<req_id>_<full_id>. Note that environments that are resolved versions of the same un-resolved environment therefore have the same prefix.

Overview of the phases needed to execute a task in a Conda environment

This implementation of Conda clearly separates out the phases needed to execute a Metaflow task in a Conda environment:

• resolving the environment: this is the step needed to go from an un-resolved environment to a fully resolved one. It does not require the downloading of packages (for the most part) nor the creation of an environment.

• caching the environment: this is an optional step which stores all the packages as well as the description of the environment in S3/azure/gs for later retrieval on environment creation. During this step, packages may be downloaded (from the web for example) but an environment is still not created.

• creating the environment: in this step, the exact set of packages needed are downloaded (if needed) and an environment is created from there. At this point, there is no resolution (we know the exact set of packages needed).

  Code organization

  Environment description

  env_descr.py contains a simple way to encode all the information needed for all the above steps, specifically it contains a set of ResolvedEnvironment which, in turn, contain the ID for the environment and information about each package. Each package, in turn, contains information about where it can be located on the web as well as caching information (where it is located in the cache). Each package can also support multiple formats (Conda uses either .tar.bz2 or .conda -- note that this is meant to support equivalent formats and not .whl versus .tar.gz for Pypi packages for example).

  Very little effort is made to remove duplicate information (packages may for example be present in several resolved environments) as modularity is favored (ie: each ResolvedEnvironment is fully self contained).

  Decorators

  The conda_flow_decorator.py and conda_step_decorator.py files simply contain trivial logic to convert the specification passed to those decorators (effectively information needed to construct the requirement ID of the environment) to something that is understandable by the rest of the system. In effect, they are mostly transformers that take user-information and convert it to the set of packages the user wants to have present in their environment.

  Environment

  The conda_environment.py file contains methods to effectively:

  • resolve all un-resolved environments in a flow
  • bootstrap Conda environments (this is analogous to some functionality in conda_step_decorator.py that has to do with starting a task locally).

The actual work is all handled in the conda.py file which contains the crux of the logic.

Detailed description of the phases

Resolving environments

All environments are resolved in parallel and independently. To do so, we either use conda-lock or mamba/conda using the --dry-run option. The processing for this takes place in resolve_environment in the conda.py file.

The input to this step is a set of user-level requirements and the output is a set of ResolvedEnvironment. At this point, no package has been downloaded and the ResolvedEnvironment is most likely missing any information about caching.

Caching environments

The cache_environments method in the conda.py file implements this.

There are several steps here. We perform these steps for all resolved environments that need their cache information updated at once to be able to exploit the fact that several environments may refer to the same package:

• first we check if we have the packages needed in cache. To do so, the path a package is uploaded to in cache is uniquely determined by its source URL.
• for all packages that are not present in the cache, we will "download" them. This is implemented in the lazy_download_packages method. We do this per architecture. The basic concept of this function is to locate the "nearest" source of the package. In order, we look for:
  • a locally present archive in some format
  • a cache present archive in some format
  • a web present archive in some format. We download the archive and transmute it if needed. The way we do downloads ensures that any downloaded package will be available if we need to create the environments locally. We take care of properly updating the list of URLs if needed (so Conda can reason about what is present in the directory).
• we then upload all packages to S3/azure/gs using our parallel uploader. Transmuted packages are also linked together so we can find them later.

The ResolvedEnvironment, now with updated cache information, is also cached to S3/azure/gs to promote sharing.

Creating environments

This is the easiest step of all and simply consists of fetching all packages (again using the lazy_download_packages method which will not download any package that is already present) and then using micromamba (or mamba/conda) to simply install all packages.

Detailed information about caching

There are two main things that are cached:

• environment themselves (so basically the ResolvedEnvironment in JSON format)
• the packages used in the environments.

There are also two levels of caching:

• locally:
  • Environment descriptions are stored in a special file called conda_v2.cnd which caches all environments already resolved. This allows us to reuse the same environment for similar user-level requirements (which is typically what the user wants).
  • Packages themselves may be cached in the pkgs directory of the Conda installation. They may be either fully expanded directories or archives.
• remotely:
  • Environment descriptiosn are also stored remotely and can be fetched to be added to the local conda_v2.cnd file.
  • Packages are stored as archived and may be downloaded in the pkgs directory. The implementation takes care of properly updating the urls.txt file to make it transparent to Conda (allowing it to operate in an "offline" mode effectively).