s3am 1.0b1.dev71

Prerequisites

Python 2.7.x, libcurl and pip.

On Ubuntu the dependencies can be installed with

sudo apt-get install python-dev gcc make libcurl4-openssl-dev

Installation

It is recommended that you install S3AM into a virtualenv:

virtualenv ~/s3am && source ~/s3am/bin/activate
pip install s3am

If you get No distributions matching the version for s3am or if you would like to install the latest unstable release, you may want to run pip install --pre s3am instead.

If you get libcurl link-time ssl backend (nss) is different from compile-time ssl backend the required fix is to prefix the pip installation command with PYCURL_SSL_LIBRARY=nss, for example PYCURL_SSL_LIBRARY=nss pip install --pre s3am.

Optionally, add a symbolic link to the s3am command such that you don’t need to activate the virtualenv before using it:

mkdir -p ~/bin
ln -s ~/s3am/bin/s3am ~/bin

Then append ~/bin to your PATH environment variable. I would tell you explicitly how to modify PATH but unfortunately this depends on various factors, e.g. which shell you are using and which operating system. On OS X, for example, you need to edit ~/.profile and append

export PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"

Configuration

Obtain an access and secret key for AWS. Create ~/.aws/credentials with the following contents:

[default]
aws_access_key_id=PASTE_YOUR_FOO_ACCESS_KEY_ID_HERE
aws_secret_access_key=PASTE_YOUR_FOO_SECRET_KEY_ID_HERE

Multiple profiles with credentials for different AWS accounts can coexist in ~/.aws/credentials:

[foo]
aws_access_key_id=PASTE_YOUR_FOO_ACCESS_KEY_ID_HERE
aws_secret_access_key=PASTE_YOUR_FOO_SECRET_KEY_ID_HERE

[bar]
aws_access_key_id=PASTE_YOUR_BAR_ACCESS_KEY_ID_HERE
aws_secret_access_key=PASTE_YOUR_BAR_SECRET_KEY_ID_HERE

If you specify multiple profiles in ~/.aws/credentials you can choose an active profile by setting the AWS_PROFILE environment variable:

export AWS_PROFILE=foo

Usage

Run with --help to display usage information:

s3am --help

For example:

s3am upload \
     ftp://ftp.1000genomes.ebi.ac.uk/vol1/ftp/data/NA12878/sequence_read/ERR001268.filt.fastq.gz \
     bd2k-test-data

If an upload was interrupted you can resume it by running the command again with the --resume option. To cancel an unfinished upload, run s3am cancel. Be aware that incomplete multipart uploads do incur storage fees.

Optimization

By default S3AM concurrently transfers one part per core. This is a very conservative setting. Since S3AM is mostly IO-bound you should significantly oversubscribe cores, probably by a factor of at least 10. On a machine with 8 cores, for example, you should run S3AM with --download-slots 40 --upload-slots 40.

If you run S3AM on EC2, you will likely have more bandwidth to S3 than from the source server. In this case it might help to have more download than upload slots.

The default part size of 5MB is also very conservative. If the source has a high latency, you will want to increase that as it might take a while for the TCP window to grow to an optimal size. If the source is ftp:// there will be significantly more round-trips before the actual transfer starts than with http:// or http://. In either case you should probably increase the part size to at least 50MB.

Building

Clone the repository, create a virtualenv, activate it and run make develop:

git clone https://github.com/BD2KGenomics/s3am.git
cd s3am
virtualenv venv
venv/bin/activate
make develop

Encryption

With SSE-C, the S3 server performs the actual encryption but the client provides the encryption key. This is more secure than plain SSE because with SSE-C the secret encryption key is not persisted on the server, it only exists there in memory for the duration of a request and is discarded afterwards. SSE-C also lets you make a bucket public and control access via the distribution of encryption keys.

Scripting

You can enable resumption and keep trying a few times:

for i in 1 2 3; do s3am upload --resume $src $dst && break; done
s3am cancel $dst

There are situations after which resumption is futile and care must be taken not to get into an infinite loop that would likely cost an infinite amount of money. S3AM exits with status code 2 on obvious user errors but there may be other failures like auth problems where user intervention is required. There is no reliable way to classify errors into resumable and non-resumable ones so S3AM doesn’t even try. Running s3am cancel is a best effort to avoid leaving unfinished uploads. If s3am upload was successful for a given object, running s3am cancel on that object does nothing.

Alternatively, you can force S3AM to eradicate previous, unsuccessful attempts, creating a clean slate and preventing them from corrupting the current attempt. This comes at the expense of wasting resources by discarding the progress made in those previous attempts:

for i in 1 2 3; s3am upload --force $src $dst && break; done
s3am cancel $dst

The –force and –resume options are mutually exclusive, but both provide a certain degree of idempotence. While --resume refuses to function if it detects multiple unfinished uploads for a given S3 object, --force is not so easily dissuaded. Hence the name.

In a Toil script I would either use the --resume option with a hand-coded loop or the --force option while relying on Toil’s built-in job retry mechanism.

Caveats

S3AM doesn’t support non-US buckets yet. See issue #12.

S3AM uses a buffer per upload and download slot. The buffer will hold an entire part. This means that the lower bound of S3AM’s memory footprint is (download_slots + upload_slots) * part_size. The buffer is needed because S3 doesn’t support chunked transfer coding.

S3AM does not implement back-to-back checksumming. An MD5 is computed for every part uploaded to S3 but there is no code in place to compare the MD5 with the source side. I think S3 exposes the MD5 of all part MD5’s concatenated. So if we could get libcurl and the sending server to support the Content-MD5 HTTP header we could use that. But that would not be as strong a guarantee as verifying the MD5 over the file in its entirety.