Amazon Batch Documentation

With Amazon Batch, you package the code for your batch jobs, specify their dependencies, and submit your batch job using the Amazon Web Services Management Console, CLIs, or SDKs. Amazon Batch allows you to specify execution parameters and job dependencies, and facilitates integration with a range of batch computing workflow engines and languages (e.g., Pegasus WMS, Luigi, Nextflow, Metaflow, Apache Airflow, and Amazon Step Functions). Amazon Batch provisions and scales Amazon EC2 and Spot Instances or leverages Fargate and Fargate Spot based on the requirements of your jobs. Amazon Batch provides default job queues and compute environment definitions that help you to get started.

When using Fargate or Fargate Spot with Batch, you set up a few concepts in Batch (a CE, job queue, and job definition), and you have a complete queue, scheduler, and compute architecture without managing compute infrastructure.

For those wanting EC2 instances, Amazon Batch provides Managed Compute Environments that provision and scale compute resources based on the volume and resource requirements of submitted jobs. You can configure your Amazon Batch Managed Compute Environments with requirements such as type of EC2 instances, VPC subnet configurations, the min/max/desired vCPUs across all instances, and the amount you are willing to pay for Spot Instances as a % of the On-Demand Instance price.

Alternatively, you can provision and manage compute resources within Amazon Batch Unmanaged Compute Environments if you need to use different configurations (e.g., larger EBS volumes or a different operating system) for your EC2 instances than what is provided by Amazon Batch Managed Compute Environments. You provision EC2 instances that include the Amazon ECS agent and run supported versions of Linux and Docker. Amazon Batch will then run batch jobs on the EC2 instances that you provision.

Amazon Batch with Fargate resources allows you to have a serverless architecture for batch jobs. With Fargate, jobs receive the amount of CPU and memory requested (within allowed Fargate SKUs), so there is a decrease in resource time and the need to wait for EC2 instance launches.

If you’re a current Batch user, Fargate allows for an additional layer of separation from EC2. Fargate is designed so that when submitting Fargate compatible jobs to Batch, there is no need to maintain two different services for workloads that run on EC2 and on Fargate. 

Amazon Web Services Provides a cloud-native scheduler with a managed queue and the ability to specify priority, retries, dependencies, timeouts, and more. Batch helps you to manage your submission to Fargate and the lifecycle of your jobs.

Fargate also helps to provide security (e.g., SOX, PCI compliance), and isolation between compute resources.

Amazon Batch supports multi-node parallel jobs, which helps you to run single jobs that span EC2 instances. This feature lets you use Amazon Batch to run workloads such as large-scale, tightly-coupled High Performance Computing (HPC) applications or distributed GPU model training. Amazon Batch also supports Elastic Fabric Adapter, a network interface that is designed to run applications that require high levels of inter-node communication at scale on Amazon Web Services. 

Amazon Batch allows you to specify resource requirements, such as vCPU and memory, Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles, volume mount points, container properties, and environment variables, to define how jobs are to be run. Amazon Batch executes your jobs as containerized applications running on Amazon ECS. Batch also helps you to define dependencies between different jobs. For example, your batch job can be composed of different stages of processing with differing resource needs. With dependencies, you can create jobs with different resource requirements where each successive job depends on the previous job.

Amazon Batch is designed to set up multiple queues with different priority levels. Batch jobs are stored in the queues until compute resources are available to execute the job. The Amazon Batch scheduler evaluates when, where, and how to run jobs that have been submitted to a queue based on the resource requirements of each job. The scheduler evaluates the priority of each queue and runs jobs in priority order on optimal compute resources (e.g., memory vs CPU optimized), as long as those jobs have no outstanding dependencies.

GPU scheduling allows you to specify the number and type of accelerators your jobs require as job definition input variables in Amazon Batch. Amazon Batch will scale up instances appropriate for your jobs based on the required number of GPUs and isolate the accelerators according to each job’s needs, so only the appropriate containers can access them.

Amazon Batch can be integrated with commercial and open-source workflow engines and languages such as Pegasus WMS, Luigi, Nextflow, Metaflow, Apache Airflow, and Amazon Step Functions, helping you to use workflow languages to model batch computing pipelines.

Amazon Batch now supports EC2 Launch Templates, which help you to build customized templates for compute resources, and enable Batch to scale instances with those requirements. You can specify your EC2 Launch Template to add storage volumes, specify network interfaces, or configure permissions, among other capabilities. EC2 Launch Templates reduce the number of steps required to configure Batch environments by capturing launch parameters within one resource.

Amazon Batch allows customers to choose how to allocate compute resources. These strategies allow customers to factor in throughput as well as price when deciding how Amazon Batch should scale instances on their behalf.

Amazon Batch displays operational metrics for your batch jobs in the Amazon Web Services Management Console. You can view metrics related to compute capacity, as well as running, pending, and completed jobs. Logs for your jobs (e.g., STDERR and STDOUT) are available in the Amazon Web Services Management Console and are also written to Amazon CloudWatch Logs.

Amazon Batch uses IAM to control and monitor the Amazon Web Services resources that your jobs can access, such as Amazon DynamoDB tables. Through IAM, you can define policies for different users in your organization. For example, admins can be granted full access permissions to any Amazon Batch API operation, developers can have limited permissions related to configuring compute environments and registering jobs, and end users can be restricted to the permissions needed to submit and delete jobs.

For additional information about service controls, security features and functionalities, including, as applicable, information about storing, retrieving, modifying, restricting, and deleting data, please see https://docs.amazonaws.cn/en_us/. This additional information does not form part of the Documentation for purposes of the Sinnet Customer Agreement for Amazon Web Services (Beijing Region), Western Cloud Data Customer Agreement for Amazon Web Services (Ningxia Region) or other agreement between you and Sinnet or NWCD governing your use of services of Amazon Web Services China Regions.