Grammarly Work Note 2023-05-30

Grammarly Work Note

Optimal Resource Utilization and Cost Reduction Strategies for Databricks Clusters

Today Grammarly Experimentations Team discussed strategies to reduce cost in a large-scale Databricks environment, where we experienced a recent spike in usage.

Background

Grammarly Experimentations Team detected a surge in resource usage in our Databricks environment around May. Since we added five default metrics to each experiment and are conducting around 60 experiments simultaneously, the daily volume of metrics being processed has significantly increased. As a result, we have observed a corresponding rise in costs.

Solutions to Explore

• Auto-Scaling Reduction. Given the considerable setup time, we can reduce the minimum number for auto-scaling from 10 to 1 as we use 4xlarge nodes.
• Creation of Instance Pools. Grammarly Experimentations Team aim to create instance pools for worker nodes with a minimum item instance set to 0. This configuration will ensure that nodes do not persist after job completion, improving cost efficiency. Instance pools also provide the flexibility to add new jobs on the fly.
• Utilization of Cheaper AWS Instances. Grammarly Experimentations Team plans to explore using more cost-effective AWS instances. Our analysis suggests that the currently utilized i3 nodes may not be necessary for these jobs. We could save costs by transitioning to more compute-optimized machines instead of the current storage-optimized ones.
• Reduction of Cluster Spinning for Non-GNAR Runtime Jobs. For tasks that do not use the GNAR runtime, we can reduce the number of new clusters we spin up.
• GNAR Runtime across Multiple Notebooks. Grammarly Experimentations Team plan to investigate running GNAR across multiple notebooks within the same cluster. Currently, the GNAR object requires reloading with every task, contributing significantly to setup time.

Case-Sensitivity

Our team encountered a bug related to case sensitivity recently. Despite the common notion that making it insensitive would improve reachability by catching more cases in a fuzzy manner, we discovered that using both sensitive and insensitive systems can lead to unhandled edges, as we experienced today.