Triggering an AWS EMR Spark job from an S3 event

Question

I am considering using AWS EMR Spark to run a Spark application against very large Parquet files stored on S3. The overall flow here is that a Java process would upload these large files to S3, and I'd like to automatically trigger the running of a Spark job (injected with the S3 keyname(s) of the files uploaded) on those files.

Ideally, there would be some kind of S3-based EMR trigger available to wire up; that is, I configure EMR/Spark to "listen" to an S3 bucket and to kick off a Spark job when an upsertis made to that bucket.

If no such trigger exists, I could probably kludge something together, such as kick off a Lambda from the S3 event, and have the Lambda somehow trigger the EMR Spark job.

However my understanding ( please correct me if I'm wrong) is that the only way to kick off a Spark job is to:

1. Package the job up as an executable JAR file; and
2. Submit it to the cluster (EMR or otherwise) via the spark-submit shell script

So if I have to do the Lambda-based kludge, I'm not exactly sure what the best way to trigger the EMR/Spark job is, seeing that Lambdas don't natively carry spark-submit in their runtimes. And even if I configured my own Lambda runtime (which I believe is now possible to do), this solution already feels really wonky and fault-intolerant.

Anybody ever trigger an EMR/Spark job from an S3 trigger or any AWS trigger before?

Answer 1

EMR Spark job can be executed as a step as in Adding a Spark Step . Step is not just at the EMR cluster creation time after bootstrap.

aws emr add-steps --cluster-id j-2AXXXXXXGAPLF --steps Type=Spark,Name="Spark Program",ActionOnFailure=CONTINUE,Args=[--class,org.apache.spark.examples.SparkPi,/usr/lib/spark/examples/jars/spark-examples.jar,10]

As it is a AWS CLI, you can invoke it from Lambda in which also you can upload the jar file to HDFS or S3, then point it using s3:// or hdfs://.

The document also has a Java example.

AWSCredentials credentials = new BasicAWSCredentials(accessKey, secretKey);
AmazonElasticMapReduce emr = new AmazonElasticMapReduceClient(credentials);

StepFactory stepFactory = new StepFactory();
AmazonElasticMapReduceClient emr = new AmazonElasticMapReduceClient(credentials);
AddJobFlowStepsRequest req = new AddJobFlowStepsRequest();
req.withJobFlowId("j-1K48XXXXXXHCB");

List<StepConfig> stepConfigs = new ArrayList<StepConfig>();

HadoopJarStepConfig sparkStepConf = new HadoopJarStepConfig()
            .withJar("command-runner.jar")
            .withArgs("spark-submit","--executor-memory","1g","--class","org.apache.spark.examples.SparkPi","/usr/lib/spark/examples/jars/spark-examples.jar","10");            

StepConfig sparkStep = new StepConfig()
            .withName("Spark Step")
            .withActionOnFailure("CONTINUE")
            .withHadoopJarStep(sparkStepConf);

stepConfigs.add(sparkStep);
req.withSteps(stepConfigs);
AddJobFlowStepsResult result = emr.addJobFlowSteps(req);