SynapseML | Simple and Distributed Machine Learning

Thanks for your questions. Here are answers:

• SageMaker PySpark SDK https://sagemaker-pyspark.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ does the opposite of what you want: being able to call a non-spark (or spark) SageMaker job from a Spark environment. Not sure that's what you need here.

• Running Spark in SageMaker jobs. While you can use SageMaker Notebooks to connect to a remote EMR cluster for interactive coding, you do not need EMR to run Spark in SageMaker jobs (Training and Processing). You have 2 options:

  • SageMaker Processing has a built-in Spark Container, which is easy to use but unfortunately not connected to SageMaker Model Tuning (that works with Training only). If you use this, you will have to find and use a third-party, external parameter search library ; for example Syne Tune from AWS itself (that supports bayesian optimization)

  • SageMaker Training can run custom docker-based jobs, on one or multiple machines. If you can fit your Spark code within SageMaker Training spec, then you will be able to use SageMaker Model Tuning to tune your Spark code. However there is no framework container for Spark on SageMaker Training, so you would have to build your own, and I am not aware of any examples. Maybe you could get inspiration from the Processing container code here to build a custom Training container

Your idea of using the Training job as a client to launch an EMR cluster is good and should work (if SM has the right permissions), and will indeed allow you to use SM Model Tuning. I'd recommend:

• each SM job to create a new transient cluster (auto-terminate after step) to keep costs low and avoid tuning results to be polluted by inter-job contention that could arise if running everything on the same cluster.
• use the cheapest possible instance type for the SM estimator, because it will need to stay up during all duration of your EMR experiment to collect and print your final metric (accuracy, duration, cost...)

In the same spirit, I once used SageMaker Training myself to launch Batch Transform jobs for the sole purpose of leveraging the bayesian search API to find an inference configuration that minimizes cost.