Step 1: Create a notebook instance Step 2: Create and upload training scripts Step 3: Build the container Step 4: Test the container Step 5: Push the container to Amazon ECR Step 6: Clean up resources Blogs and Case Studies

Adapting your own training container

To run your own training model, build a Docker container using the Amazon SageMaker Training Toolkit through an Amazon SageMaker notebook instance.

Step 1: Create a SageMaker notebook instance

Open the Amazon SageMaker console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/.
In the left navigation pane, choose Notebook, choose Notebook instances, and then choose Create notebook instance.
On the Create notebook instance page, provide the following information:
1. For Notebook instance name, enter RunScriptNotebookInstance.
2. For Notebook Instance type, choose ml.t2.medium.
3. In the Permissions and encryption section, do the following:
  1. For IAM role, choose Create a new role. This opens a new window.
  2. On the Create an IAM role page, choose Specific S3 buckets, specify an Amazon S3 bucket named sagemaker-run-script, and then choose Create role.
    
    SageMaker creates an IAM role named AmazonSageMaker-ExecutionRole-YYYYMMDDTHHmmSS. For example, AmazonSageMaker-ExecutionRole-20190429T110788. Note that the execution role naming convention uses the date and time at which the role was created, separated by a T.
4. For Root Access, choose Enable.
5. Choose Create notebook instance.
On the Notebook instances page, the Status is Pending. It can take a few minutes for Amazon SageMaker to launch a machine learning compute instance—in this case, it launches a notebook instance—and attach an ML storage volume to it. The notebook instance has a preconfigured Jupyter notebook server and a set of Anaconda libraries. For more information, see  CreateNotebookInstance.
Click on the Name of the notebook you just created. This opens a new page.
In the Permissions and encryption section, copy the IAM role ARN number, and paste it into a notepad file to save it temporarily. You use this IAM role ARN number later to configure a local training estimator in the notebook instance. The IAM role ARN number looks like the following: 'arn:aws:iam::111122223333:role/service-role/AmazonSageMaker-ExecutionRole-20190429T110788'
After the status of the notebook instance changes to InService, choose Open JupyterLab.

Step 2: Create and upload the Dockerfile and Python training scripts

After JupyterLab opens, create a new folder in the home directory of your JupyterLab. In the upper-left corner, choose the New Folder icon, and then enter the folder name docker_test_folder.
Create a Dockerfile text file in the docker_test_folder directory.
1. Choose the New Launcher icon (+) in the upper-left corner.
2. In the right pane under the Other section, choose Text File.
3. Paste the following Dockerfile sample code into your text file.
```
#Download an open source TensorFlow Docker image
FROM tensorflow/tensorflow:latest-gpu-jupyter

# Install sagemaker-training toolkit that contains the common functionality necessary to create a container compatible with SageMaker and the Python SDK.
RUN pip3 install sagemaker-training

# Copies the training code inside the container
COPY train.py /opt/ml/code/train.py

# Defines train.py as script entrypoint
ENV SAGEMAKER_PROGRAM train.py
```
  The Dockerfile script performs the following tasks:
  - FROM tensorflow/tensorflow:latest-gpu-jupyter – Downloads the latest TensorFlow Docker base image. You can replace this with any Docker base image you want to bring to build containers, as well as with AWS pre-built container base images.
  - RUN pip install sagemaker-training – Installs SageMaker Training Toolkit that contains the common functionality necessary to create a container compatible with SageMaker.
  - COPY train.py /opt/ml/code/train.py – Copies the script to the location inside the container that is expected by SageMaker. The script must be located in this folder.
  - ENV SAGEMAKER_PROGRAM train.py – Takes your training script train.py as the entrypoint script copied in the /opt/ml/code folder of the container. This is the only environmental variable that you must specify when you build your own container.
4. On the left directory navigation pane, the text file name might automatically be named untitled.txt. To rename the file, right-click the file, choose Rename, rename the file as Dockerfile without the .txt extension, and then press Ctrl+s or Command+s to save the file.

Upload a training script train.py to the docker_test_folder. You can use the following example script to create a model that reads handwritten digits trained on the MNIST dataset for this exercise.


import tensorflow as tf
import os

mnist = tf.keras.datasets.mnist

(x_train, y_train), (x_test, y_test) = mnist.load_data()
x_train, x_test = x_train / 255.0, x_test / 255.0

model = tf.keras.models.Sequential([
tf.keras.layers.Flatten(input_shape=(28, 28)),
tf.keras.layers.Dense(128, activation='relu'),
tf.keras.layers.Dropout(0.2),
tf.keras.layers.Dense(10, activation='softmax')
])

model.compile(optimizer='adam',
loss='sparse_categorical_crossentropy',
metrics=['accuracy'])

model.fit(x_train, y_train, epochs=1)
model_save_dir = f"{os.environ.get('SM_MODEL_DIR')}/1"

model.evaluate(x_test, y_test)
tf.saved_model.save(model, model_save_dir)

Step 3: Build the container

In the JupyterLab home directory, open a Jupyter notebook. To open a new notebook, choose the New Launch icon and then choose the latest version of conda_tensorflow2 in the Notebook section.
Run the following command in the first notebook cell to change to the docker_test_folder directory:
```
cd ~/SageMaker/docker_test_folder
```
This returns your current directory as follows:
```
! pwd
```
output: /home/ec2-user/SageMaker/docker_test_folder
To build the Docker container, run the following Docker build command, including the space followed by a period at the end:
```
! docker build -t tf-custom-container-test .
```
The Docker build command must be run from the Docker directory you created, in this case docker_test_folder.
Note
If you get the following error message that Docker cannot find the Dockerfile, make sure the Dockerfile has the correct name and has been saved to the directory.
```
unable to prepare context: unable to evaluate symlinks in Dockerfile path: 
lstat /home/ec2-user/SageMaker/docker/Dockerfile: no such file or directory
```
Remember that docker looks for a file specifically called Dockerfile without any extension within the current directory. If you named it something else, you can pass in the file name manually with the -f flag. For example, if you named your Dockerfile as Dockerfile-text.txt, run the following command:
```
! docker build -t tf-custom-container-test -f Dockerfile-text.txt .
```

Step 4: Test the container

To test the container locally in the notebook instance, open a Jupyter notebook. Choose New Launcher and choose the latest version of conda_tensorflow2 in the Notebook section.
Paste the following example script into the notebook code cell to configure a SageMaker Estimator.
```
import sagemaker
from sagemaker.estimator import Estimator

estimator = Estimator(image_uri='tf-custom-container-test',
                      role=sagemaker.get_execution_role(),
                      instance_count=1,
                      instance_type='local')

estimator.fit()
```
In the preceding code example, sagemaker.get_execution_role() is specified to the role argument to automatically retrieve the role set up for the SageMaker session. You can also replace it with the string value of the IAM role ARN number you used when you configured the notebook instance. The ARN should look like the following: 'arn:aws:iam::111122223333:role/service-role/AmazonSageMaker-ExecutionRole-20190429T110788'.
Run the code cell. This test outputs the training environment configuration, the values used for the environmental variables, the source of the data, and the loss and accuracy obtained during training.

Step 5: Push the container to Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR)

After you successfully run the local mode test, you can push the Docker container to Amazon ECR and use it to run training jobs. If you want to use a private Docker registry instead of Amazon ECR, see Push your training container to a private registry.

Run the following command lines in a notebook cell.


%%sh

# Specify an algorithm name
algorithm_name=tf-custom-container-test

account=$(aws sts get-caller-identity --query Account --output text)

# Get the region defined in the current configuration (default to us-west-2 if none defined)
region=$(aws configure get region)
region=${region:-us-west-2}

fullname="${account}.dkr.ecr.${region}.amazonaws.com/${algorithm_name}:latest"

# If the repository doesn't exist in ECR, create it.

aws ecr describe-repositories --repository-names "${algorithm_name}" > /dev/null 2>&1
if [ $? -ne 0 ]
then
aws ecr create-repository --repository-name "${algorithm_name}" > /dev/null
fi

# Get the login command from ECR and execute it directly

aws ecr get-login-password --region ${region}|docker login --username AWS --password-stdin ${fullname}

# Build the docker image locally with the image name and then push it to ECR
# with the full name.

docker build -t ${algorithm_name} .
docker tag ${algorithm_name} ${fullname}

docker push ${fullname}

Note

This bash shell script may raise a permission issue similar to the following error message:


"denied: User: [ARN] is not authorized to perform: ecr:InitiateLayerUpload on resource:
arn:aws:ecr:us-east-1:[id]:repository/tf-custom-container-test"

If this error occurs, you need to attach the AmazonEC2ContainerRegistryFullAccess policy to your IAM role. Go to the IAM console, choose Roles from the left navigation pane, look up the IAMrole you used for the Notebook instance. Under the Permission tab, choose the Attach policies button, and search the AmazonEC2ContainerRegistryFullAccess policy. Mark the check box of the policy, and choose Add permissions to finish.

Run the following code in a Studio notebook cell to call the Amazon ECR image of your training container.


import boto3

account_id = boto3.client('sts').get_caller_identity().get('Account')
ecr_repository = 'tf-custom-container-test'
tag = ':latest'

region = boto3.session.Session().region_name

uri_suffix = 'amazonaws.com'
if region in ['cn-north-1', 'cn-northwest-1']:
    uri_suffix = 'amazonaws.com.cn'

byoc_image_uri = '{}.dkr.ecr.{}.{}/{}'.format(account_id, region, uri_suffix, ecr_repository + tag)

byoc_image_uri
# This should return something like
# 111122223333.dkr.ecr.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/sagemaker-byoc-test:latest

Use the ecr_image retrieved from the previous step to configure a SageMaker estimator object. The following code sample configures a SageMaker estimator with the byoc_image_uri and initiates a training job on an Amazon EC2 instance.

If you want to deploy your model using your own container, refer to Adapting Your Own Inference Container. You can also use an AWSframework container that can deploy a TensorFlow model. To deploy the example model to read handwritten digits, enter the following example script into the same notebook that you used to train your model in the previous sub-step to obtain the image URIs (universal resource identifiers) needed for deployment, and deploy the model.


import boto3
import sagemaker

#obtain image uris
from sagemaker import image_uris
container = image_uris.retrieve(framework='tensorflow',region='us-west-2',version='2.11.0',
                    image_scope='inference',instance_type='ml.g4dn.xlarge')

#create the model entity, endpoint configuration and endpoint
predictor = estimator.deploy(1,instance_type='ml.g4dn.xlarge',image_uri=container)

Test your model using a sample handwritten digit from the MNIST dataset using the following code example.


#Retrieve an example test dataset to test
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from keras.datasets import mnist

# Load the MNIST dataset and split it into training and testing sets
(x_train, y_train), (x_test, y_test) = mnist.load_data()
# Select a random example from the training set
example_index = np.random.randint(0, x_train.shape[0])
example_image = x_train[example_index]
example_label = y_train[example_index]

# Print the label and show the image
print(f"Label: {example_label}")
plt.imshow(example_image, cmap='gray')
plt.show()

Convert the test handwritten digit into a form that TensorFlow can ingest and make a test prediction.


from sagemaker.serializers import JSONSerializer
data = {"instances": example_image.tolist()}
predictor.serializer=JSONSerializer() #update the predictor to use the JSONSerializer
predictor.predict(data) #make the prediction

For a full example that shows how to test a custom container locally and push it to an Amazon ECR image, see the Building Your Own TensorFlow Container example notebook.

Tip

To profile and debug training jobs to monitor system utilization issues (such as CPU bottlenecks and GPU underutilization) and identify training issues (such as overfitting, overtraining, exploding tensors, and vanishing gradients), use Amazon SageMaker Debugger. For more information, see Use Debugger with Custom Training Containers.

Step 6: Clean up resources

To clean up resources when done with the get started example

Open the SageMaker console, choose the notebook instance RunScriptNotebookInstance, choose Actions, and choose Stop. It can take a few minutes for the instance to stop.
After the instance Status changes to Stopped, choose Actions, choose Delete, and then choose Delete in the dialog box. It can take a few minutes for the instance to be deleted. The notebook instance disappears from the table when it has been deleted.
Open the Amazon S3 console and delete the bucket that you created for storing model artifacts and the training dataset.
Open the IAM console and delete the IAM role. If you created permission policies, you can delete them, too.

Note
The Docker container shuts down automatically after it has run. You don't need to delete it.

Blogs and Case Studies

The following blogs discuss case studies about using custom training containers in Amazon SageMaker.

Why bring your own container to Amazon SageMaker and how to do it right, Medium (January 20th, 2023)

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SageMaker Training and Inference Toolkits

Adapt your training job to access images in a private Docker registry