Nightly Data Builds#

The complete ETL and tests run every night on a Google Compute Engine (GCE) instance so new code merged into dev can be fully tested. These complete builds also enable continuous deployment of PUDL’s data outputs.

The builds are kicked off by the build-deploy-pudl GitHub Action, which builds and pushes a Docker image with PUDL installed to Docker Hub and deploys the image as a container to a GCE instance. The container runs the ETL and tests, then copies the outputs to GCS buckets for the PUDL Intake catalogs to consume.

Breaking the Builds#

The nightly data builds based on the dev branch are our comprehensive integration tests. When they pass, we consider the results fit for public consumption. The builds are expected to pass. If they don’t then someone needs to take responsibility for getting them working again with some urgency.

Because of how long the full build & tests take, we don’t typically run them individually before merging every PR into dev. However, running tox -e nuke (the equivalent of the full builds) is recommended when you’ve added a new year of data or made other changes that would be expected to break the data validations, so that the appropriate changes can be made prior to those changes hitting dev and the nightly builds.

If your PR causes the build to fail, you are probably the best person to fix the problem, since you already have context on all of the changes that went into it.

Having multiple PRs merged into dev simultaneously when the builds are breaking makes it ambiguous where the problem is coming from, makes debugging harder, and diffuses responsibility for the breakage across several people, so it’s important to fix the breakage quickly. In some cases we may delay merging additional PRs into dev if the builds are failing to avoid ambiguity and facilitate debugging.

Therefore, we’ve adopted the following etiquette regarding build breakage: On the morning after you merge a PR into dev, you should check whether the nightly builds succeeded by looking in the pudl-deployments Slack channel (which all team members should be subscribed to). If the builds failed, look at the logging output (which is included as an attachment to the notification) and figure out what kind of failure occurred:

  • If the failure is due to your changes, then you are responsible for fixing the problem and making a new PR to dev that resolves it, and it should be a high priority. If you’re stumped, ask for help!

  • If the failure is due to an infrastructural issue like the build server running out of memory and the build process getting killed, then you need to notify the member who is in charge of managing the builds (Currently @bendnorman), and hand off responsibility for debugging and fixing the issue.

  • If the failure is the result of a transient problem outside of our control like a network connection failing, then wait until the next morning and repeat the above process. If the “transient” problem persists, bring it up with the person managing the builds.

The GitHub Action#

The build-deploy-pudl GitHub action contains the main coordination logic for the Nightly Data Builds. The action is triggered every night and when new tags are pushed to the PUDL repository. This way, new data outputs are automatically updated on code releases, and PUDL’s code and data are tested every night. The action is modeled after an example from the setup-gcloud GitHub action repository.

Unfortunately, scheduled actions only run on the default branch. To run scheduled builds on the dev branch, the actions/checkout step checks out the dev branch if a schedule triggers the action and the main branch if a tag triggers the action.

The gcloud command in build-deploy-pudl requires certain Google Cloud Platform (GCP) permissions to start and update the GCE instance. The gcloud command authenticates using a service account key for the deploy-pudl-github-action service account stored in PUDL’s GitHub secrets as DEPLOY_PUDL_SA_KEY. The deploy-pudl-github-action service account has the Compute Instance Admin (v1) IAM role on the GCE instances to update the container and start the instance.

Google Compute Engine#

The PUDL image is deployed on a Container Optimized GCE instance, a type of virtual machine (VM) built to run containers. The pudl-deployment-dev and pudl-deployment-tag instances in the catalyst-cooperative-pudl GCP project handle deployments from the dev branch and tags, respectively. There are two VMs so a scheduled and a tag build can run at the same time.

Note

If a tag build starts before the previous tag build has finished, the previous build will be interrupted.

PUDL’s VMs have 32 GB of RAM and 8 CPUs to accommodate the PUDL ETL’s memory-intensive steps. Currently, these VMs do not have swap space enabled.

Each GCE VM has a service account that gives the VM permissions to GCP resources. The two PUDL deployment VMs share the deploy-pudl-vm-service-account. This service account has permissions to:

  1. Write logs to Cloud Logging.

  2. Start and stop the VM so the container can shut the instance off when the ETL is complete, so Catalyst does not incur unnecessary charges.

  3. Bill the catalyst-cooperative-pudl project for egress fees from accessing the zenodo-cache.catalyst.coop bucket. Note: The catalyst-cooperative-pudl won’t be charged anything because the data stays within Google’s network.

  4. Write logs and outputs to pudl-etl-logs and intake.catalyst.coop buckets.

Docker#

The Docker image the VMs pull installs PUDL into a mamba environment. The VMs are configured to run the docker/gcp_pudl_etl.sh script. This script:

  1. Notifies the pudl-deployments Slack channel that a deployment has started. Note: if the container is manually stopped, slack will not be notified.

  2. Runs the ETL and full test suite.

  3. Copies the outputs and logs to a directory in the pudl-etl-logs bucket. The directory is named using the git SHA of the commit that launched the build.

  4. Copies the outputs to the intake.catalyst.coop bucket if the ETL and test suite run successfully.

  5. Notifies the pudl-deployments Slack channel with the final build status.

The gcp_pudl_etl.sh script is only intended to run on a GCE VM with adequate permissions. The full ETL and tests can be run locally by running these commands from the pudl directory:

docker compose -f docker/docker-compose.yml build
docker compose -f docker/docker-compose.yml up