Orchestrate Ray jobs with Apache Airflow®

Ray is an open-source framework for scaling Python applications, particularly for machine learning and AI workloads where it provides the layer for parallel processing and distributed computing. Many large language models (LLMs) are trained using Ray, including OpenAI’s GPT models. The Ray provider package for Apache Airflow® allows you to interact with Ray from your Airflow DAGs. This tutorial demonstrates how to use the Ray provider package to orchestrate a simple Ray job with Airflow in an existing Ray cluster. For more in-depth information, see the Ray provider documentation. For instructions on how to run Ray jobs on the Anyscale platform with Airflow, see the Orchestrate Ray jobs on Anyscale with Apache Airflow® tutorial.

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Time to complete

This tutorial takes approximately 30 minutes to complete.

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Assumed knowledge

To get the most out of this tutorial, make sure you have an understanding of:

• Ray basics. See the Getting Started section of the Ray documentation.
• Airflow operators. See Airflow operators.

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Prerequisites

• The Astro CLI.
• A pre-existing Ray cluster. This tutorial uses a pre-existing local Ray cluster set up using kind as shown in the RayCluster Quickstart.

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Step 1: Configure your Astro project

Use the Astro CLI to create and run an Airflow project on your local machine.

1. Create a new Astro project:
   $ mkdir astro-ray-tutorial && cd astro-ray-tutorial
   $ astro dev init
   
2. In the requirements.txt file, add the Ray provider.
   astro-provider-ray==0.2.1
   
3. Run the following command to start your Airflow project:
   astro dev start
   

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Step 2: Configure a Ray connection

1. In the Airflow UI, go to Admin -> Connections and click +.
2. Create a new connection and choose the Ray connection type. Enter the following information:
   • Connection ID: ray_conn
   • Ray dashboard URL: Your Ray dashboard URL, for example http://kind-control-plane:8265.
   • For this local tutorial, click the Disable SSL checkbox.
3. Click Save.

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Step 3: Write a DAG to orchestrate Ray jobs

1. Create a new file in your dags directory called ray_tutorial.py.
2. Copy and paste the code below into the file:
   """
   ## Ray Tutorial
   
   This tutorial demonstrates how to use the Ray provider in Airflow to parallelize
   a task using Ray.
   """
   
   from airflow.decorators import dag, task
   from ray_provider.decorators.ray import ray
   
   CONN_ID = "ray_conn"
   RAY_TASK_CONFIG = {
       "conn_id": CONN_ID,
       "num_cpus": 1,
       "num_gpus": 0,
       "memory": 0,
       "poll_interval": 5,
   }
   
   
   @dag(
       start_date=None,
       schedule=None,
       catchup=False,
       tags=["ray", "example"],
       doc_md=__doc__,
   )
   def test_taskflow():
   
       @task
       def generate_data() -> list:
           """
           Generate sample data
           Returns:
               list: List of integers
           """
           import random
   
           return [random.randint(1, 100) for _ in range(10)]
   
       # use the @ray.task decorator to parallelize the task
       @ray.task(config=RAY_TASK_CONFIG)
       def get_mean_squared_value(data: list) -> float:
           """
           Get the mean squared value from a list of integers
           Args:
               data (list): List of integers
           Returns:
               float: Mean value of the list
           """
           import numpy as np
           import ray
   
           @ray.remote
           def square(x: int) -> int:
               """
               Square a number
               Args:
                   x (int): Number to square
               Returns:
                   int: Squared number
               """
               return x**2
   
           ray.init()
           data = np.array(data)
           futures = [square.remote(x) for x in data]
           results = ray.get(futures)
           mean = np.mean(results)
           print(f"Mean squared value: {mean}")
   
       data = generate_data()
       get_mean_squared_value(data)
   
   
   test_taskflow()
   

   See all 76 lines

This is a simple DAG comprised of two tasks:

• The generate_data task randomly generates a list of 10 integers.
• The get_mean_squared_value task submits a Ray job on Anyscale to calculate the mean squared value of the list of integers.

3. (Optional). If you are using the traditional syntax with the SubmitRayJob operator, you need to provide the Python code to run in the Ray job as a script. Create a new file in your dags directory called ray_script.py and add the following code:
   # ray_script.py
   @ray.remote
   def square(x):
       return x**2
   
   def main(data):
       ray.init()
       data = np.array(data)
       futures = [square.remote(x) for x in data]
       results = ray.get(futures)
       mean = np.mean(results)
       print(f"Mean of this population is {mean}")
       return mean
   
   if __name__ == "__main__":
       parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="Process some integers.")
       parser.add_argument('data', nargs='+', type=float, help='List of numbers to process')
       args = parser.parse_args()
   
       data = args.data
       main(data)
   
   

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Step 4: Run the DAG

1. In the Airflow UI, click the play button to manually run your DAG.
2. After the DAG runs successfully, check go to your Ray dashboard to see the job submitted by Airflow.
   

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Conclusion

Congratulations! You’ve run a Ray job using Apache Airflow. You can now use the Ray provider package to orchestrate more complex Ray jobs, see Processing User Feedback: an LLM-fine-tuning reference architecture with Ray on Anyscale for an example.