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Running SkyPilot tasks in Airflow

In this guide, we show how a training workflow involving data preprocessing, training and evaluation can be first easily developed with SkyPilot, and then orchestrated in Airflow.

💡 Tip: SkyPilot also supports defining and running pipelines without Airflow. Check out Jobs Pipelines for more information.

Why use SkyPilot with Airflow?

In AI workflows, the transition from development to production is hard.

Workflow development happens ad-hoc, with a lot of interaction required with the code and data. When moving this to an Airflow DAG in production, managing dependencies, environments and the infra requirements of the workflow gets complex. Porting the code to an airflow requires significant time to test and validate any changes, often requiring re-writing the code as Airflow operators.

SkyPilot seamlessly bridges the dev -> production gap.

SkyPilot can operate on any of your infra, allowing you to package and run the same code that you ran during development on a production Airflow cluster. Behind the scenes, SkyPilot handles environment setup, dependency management, and infra orchestration, allowing you to focus on your code.

Here's how you can use SkyPilot to take your dev workflows to production in Airflow:

  1. Define and test your workflow as SkyPilot tasks.
  2. Orchestrate SkyPilot tasks in Airflow by invoking sky launch on their YAMLs as a task in the Airflow DAG.
    • Airflow does the scheduling, logging, and monitoring, while SkyPilot handles the infra setup and task execution.

Prerequisites

  • Airflow installed on a Kubernetes cluster or locally (SequentialExecutor)
  • A Kubernetes cluster to run tasks on. We'll use GKE in this example.
  • A Google cloud account with GCS access to store the data for task.

Preparing the Kubernetes Cluster

  1. Provision a service account on your Kubernetes cluster for SkyPilot to use to launch tasks.

    kubectl apply -f sky-sa.yaml

    For reference, here are the contents of sky-sa.yaml:

    # sky-sa.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
  name: sky-airflow-sa
  namespace: default
---
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: ClusterRoleBinding
metadata:
  name: sky-airflow-sa-binding
subjects:
- kind: ServiceAccount
  name: sky-airflow-sa
  namespace: default
roleRef:
  # For minimal permissions, refer to https://skypilot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/cloud-setup/cloud-permissions/kubernetes.html
  kind: ClusterRole
  name: cluster-admin
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io

  2. We will store intermediate task outputs in a google cloud bucket. Use the following command to create a unique bucket:

    gsutil mb gs://<bucket-name>

    Take note of the bucket name, as it will be used in the task YAMLs.

  3. To provide SkyPilot GCP access, we will create GCP credentials as secrets that will be mounted in SkyPilot's pods. We provide a helper script create_gcloud_secret.sh to create the secret:

    ./create_gcloud_secret.sh

    You can also use other methods, such as GKE workload identity federation, to provide SkyPilot pods access to GCP credentials.

Defining the tasks

We will define the following tasks to mock a training workflow:

  1. data_preprocessing.yaml: Generates data and writes it to a bucket.
  2. train.yaml: Trains a model on the data in the bucket.
  3. eval.yaml: Evaluates the model and writes evaluation results to the bucket.

We have defined these tasks in the mock_training_workflow repository. Clone the repository and follow the instructions in the README to run the tasks.

When developing the workflow, you can run the tasks independently using sky launch:

git clone https://github.com/romilbhardwaj/mock_train_workflow.git
cd mock_train_workflow
# Run the data preprocessing task, replacing <bucket-name> with the bucket you created above
sky launch -c data --env DATA_BUCKET_URL=gs://<bucket-name> data_preprocessing.yaml

The train and eval step can be run in a similar way:

# Run the train task
sky launch -c train --env DATA_BUCKET_URL=gs://<bucket-name> train.yaml

Hint: You can use ssh and VSCode to interactively develop and debug the tasks.

Note: eval can be optionally run on the same cluster as train with sky exec. Refer to the shared_state airflow example on how to do this.

Writing the Airflow DAG

Once we have developed the tasks, we can seamlessly port them to Airflow.

  1. No changes required to our tasks - we use the same YAMLs we wrote in the previous step to create an Airflow DAG in sky_k8s_train_pipeline.py.
  2. Airflow native logging - SkyPilot logs are written to container stdout, which is captured as task logs in Airflow and displayed in the UI.
  3. Easy debugging - If a task fails, you can independently run the task using sky launch to debug the issue. SkyPilot will recreate the environment in which the task failed.

Here's a snippet of the DAG declaration in sky_k8s_train_pipeline.py:

with DAG(dag_id='sky_k8s_train_pipeline', ...) as dag:
    # Make sure bucket exists with gsutil mb -l us-central1 gs://<bucket-name>
    bucket_url = "gs://sky-data-demo"

    # Launch data preprocessing task. We use --down to clean up the SkyPilot cluster after the task is done.
    data_preprocess = get_skypilot_task("sky_data_preprocess",
                                        f"sky launch -y -c data --down --cloud kubernetes --env DATA_BUCKET_URL={bucket_url} mock_train_workflow/data_preprocessing.yaml")

    # Task to train the model
    train = get_skypilot_task("sky_train",
                              f"sky launch -y -c train --down --cloud kubernetes --env DATA_BUCKET_URL={bucket_url} mock_train_workflow/train.yaml")

    # Task to evaluate the trained model. This can optionally be run on the same cluster as the training task using `sky exec`
    eval = get_skypilot_task("sky_eval",
                             f"sky launch -y -c eval --down --cloud kubernetes --env DATA_BUCKET_URL={bucket_url} mock_train_workflow/eval.yaml")

    data_preprocess >> train >> eval

Behind the scenes, the get_skypilot_task uses the KubernetesPodOperator to run the sky CLI in an ephemeral pod. All clusters are set to auto-down after the task is done, so no dangling clusters are left behind.

Running the DAG

  1. Copy the DAG file to the Airflow DAGs directory. 
    cp sky_k8s_train_pipeline.py /path/to/airflow/dags                                              
# If your Airflow is running on Kubernetes, you may use kubectl cp to copy the file to the pod
# kubectl cp sky_k8s_example.py <airflow-pod-name>:/opt/airflow/dags
  2. Run airflow dags list to confirm that the DAG is loaded.
  3. Find the DAG in the Airflow UI (typically http://localhost:8080) and enable it. The UI may take a couple of minutes to reflect the changes.
  4. Trigger the DAG from the Airflow UI using the Trigger DAG button.
  5. Navigate to the run in the Airflow UI to see the DAG progress and logs of each task.

Future work: a native Airflow Executor built on SkyPilot

Currently this example relies on a helper get_skypilot_task method to wrap SkyPilot invocation in a KubernetesPodOperator, but in the future SkyPilot can provide a native Airflow Executor.

In such a setup, SkyPilot state management also not be required, as the executor will handle SkyPilot cluster launching and termination.