The S3 Artifact Store is an Artifact Store flavor provided with the S3 ZenML integration that uses the AWS S3 managed object storage service or one of the self-hosted S3 alternatives, such as MinIO or Ceph RGW, to store artifacts in an S3 compatible object storage backend.

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When would you want to use it?

Running ZenML pipelines with the local Artifact Store is usually sufficient if you just want to evaluate ZenML or get started quickly without incurring the trouble and the cost of employing cloud storage services in your stack. However, the local Artifact Store becomes insufficient or unsuitable if you have more elaborate needs for your project:
  • if you want to share your pipeline run results with other team members or stakeholders inside or outside your organization
  • if you have other components in your stack that are running remotely (e.g. a Kubeflow or Kubernetes Orchestrator running in public cloud).
  • if you outgrow what your local machine can offer in terms of storage space and need to use some form of private or public storage service that is shared with others
  • if you are running pipelines at scale and need an Artifact Store that can handle the demands of production grade MLOps
In all these cases, you need an Artifact Store that is backed by a form of public cloud or self-hosted shared object storage service. You should use the S3 Artifact Store when you decide to keep your ZenML artifacts in a shared object storage and if you have access to the AWS S3 managed service or one of the S3 compatible alternatives (e.g. Minio, Ceph RGW). You should consider one of the other Artifact Store flavors if you don’t have access to an S3 compatible service.

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How do you deploy it?

The S3 Artifact Store flavor is provided by the S3 ZenML integration, you need to install it on your local machine to be able to register an S3 Artifact Store and add it to your stack: 
zenml integration install s3 -y
The only configuration parameter mandatory for registering an S3 Artifact Store is the root path URI, which needs to point to an S3 bucket and takes the form s3://bucket-name. Please read the documentation relevant to the S3 service that you are using on how to create an S3 bucket. For example, the AWS S3 documentation is available here. With the URI to your S3 bucket known, registering an S3 Artifact Store and using it in a stack can be done as follows: 
# Register the S3 artifact-store
zenml artifact-store register s3_store -f s3 --path=s3://bucket-name

# Register and set a stack with the new artifact store
zenml stack register custom_stack -a s3_store ... --set
Depending on your use-case, however, you may also need to provide additional configuration parameters pertaining to authentication or pass advanced configuration parameters to match your S3 compatible service or deployment scenario.

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Authentication Methods

Integrating and using an S3 compatible Artifact Store in your pipelines is not possible without employing some form of authentication. ZenML currently provides three options for configuring S3 credentials, the recommended one being to use a Secrets Manager in your stack to store the sensitive information in a secure location. Implicit Authentication Explicit Credentials Secrets Manager (Recommended) This method uses the implicit AWS authentication available in the environment where the ZenML code is running. On your local machine, this is the quickest way to configure an S3 Artifact Store. You don’t need to supply credentials explicitly when you register the S3 Artifact Store, as it leverages the local credentials and configuration that the AWS CLI stores on your local machine. However, you will need to install and set up the AWS CLI on your machine as a prerequisite, as covered in the AWS CLI documentation, before you register the S3 Artifact Store. The implicit authentication method needs to be coordinated with other stack components that are highly dependent on the Artifact Store and need to interact with it directly to function. If these components are not running on your machine, they do not have access to the local AWS CLI configuration and will encounter authentication failures while trying to access the S3 Artifact Store:
  • Orchestrators need to access the Artifact Store to manage pipeline artifacts
  • Step Operators need to access the Artifact Store to manage step level artifacts
  • Model Deployers need to access the Artifact Store to load served models
These remote stack components can still use the implicit authentication method: if they are also running on Amazon EC2 or EKS nodes, ZenML will try to load credentials from the instance metadata service. In order to take advantage of this feature, you must have specified an IAM role to use when you launched your EC2 instance or EKS cluster. This mechanism allows AWS workloads like EC2 instances and EKS pods to access other AWS services without requiring explicit credentials. For more information on how to configure IAM roles: If you have remote stack components that are not running in AWS Cloud, or if you are unsure how to configure them to use IAM roles, you should use one of the other authentication methods. Use this method to store the S3 credentials in the Artifact Store configuration. When you register the S3 Artifact Store, you may include the credentials directly in the Artifact Store configuration. This has the advantage that you don’t need to install and configure the AWS CLI or set up a Secrets Manager in your stack, but the credentials won’t be stored securely and will be visible in the stack configuration: 
# Register the S3 artifact-store
zenml artifact-store register s3_store -f s3 \
    --path='s3://your-bucket' \
    --key='your-S3-access-key-ID' \
    --secret='your-S3-secret-key' \
    --token='your-S3-token'

# Register and set a stack with the new artifact store
zenml stack register custom_stack -a s3_store ... --set
This method requires using a Secrets Manager in your stack to store the sensitive S3 authentication information in a secure location. The S3 credentials are configured as a ZenML secret that is referenced in the Artifact Store configuration, e.g.: 
# Register the S3 artifact store
zenml artifact-store register s3_store -f s3 \
    --path='s3://your-bucket' \
    --authentication_secret=s3_secret

# Register a secrets manager
zenml secrets-manager register secrets_manager \
    --flavor= ...

# Register and set a stack with the new artifact store and secrets manager
zenml stack register custom_stack -a s3_store -x secrets_manager ... --set

# Create the secret referenced in the artifact store
zenml secrets-manager secret register s3_secret -s aws \
    --aws_access_key_id='your-S3-access-key-ID' \
    --aws_secret_access_key='your-S3-secret-key' \
    --aws_session_token='your-S3-token'

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Advanced Configuration

The S3 Artifact Store accepts a range of advanced configuration options that can be used to further customize how ZenML connects to the S3 storage service that you are using. These are accessible via the client_kwargs, config_kwargs and s3_additional_kwargs configuration attributes and are passed transparently to the underlying S3Fs library:
  • client_kwargs: arguments that will be transparently passed to the botocore client. You can use it to configure parameters like endpoint_url and region_name when connecting to an S3 compatible endpoint (e.g. Minio).
  • config_kwargs: advanced parameters passed to botocore.client.Config.
  • s3_additional_kwargs: advanced parameters that are used when calling S3 API, typically used for things like ServerSideEncryption and ACL.
To include these advanced parameters in your Artifact Store configuration, pass them using JSON format during registration, e.g.: 
zenml artifact-store register minio_store -f s3 \
    --path='s3://minio_bucket' \
    --authentication_secret=s3_secret
    --client_kwargs='{"endpoint_url:"http://minio.cluster.local:9000", "region_name":"us-east-1"}'
For more, up-to-date information on the S3 Artifact Store implementation and its configuration, you can have a look at the API docs.

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How do you use it?

Aside from the fact that the artifacts are stored in an S3 compatible backend, using the S3 Artifact Store is no different than using any other flavor of Artifact Store.