Purchase Standalone Serving Layer

(Looking for the complete Myrrix system, including Computation Layer? It's also available on Amazon EMR now.)

While the Serving Layer may be freely downloaded and run manually, it can also be run it right now on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. The Serving Layer, in stand-alone mode, is a production-ready recommender system for small- to medium-sized workloads, and is available on-demand in minutes. Amazon then bills by the hour for running the server.

Pricing

Deployment Pricing Example Monthly Cost Example Scale
Your Server Free and open source Limited only by your hardware
Amazon EC2 $0.03 and up per hour (varies by instance type and region), plus
EC2 hourly instance cost 		One m1.large instance in the us-east-1 region, run continuously costs $217 per month: $0.042 per hour software and $0.26 per hour instance cost One m1.large instance supports about 1 million total users and items, depending on data, and approximately 10-30 requests per second (theoretical maximum 25-75M monthly requests)

For the stand-alone Serving Layer, support is provided on a best-effort basis from our support site.

Get Myrrix Now on Amazon

To use the Serving Layer on Amazon, an Amazon AWS account is needed. The Myrrix Serving Layer may be accessed after first signing up for access to the software via DevPay:

Get Access to Myrrix Serving Layer

At this point you can launch the Serving Layer using Amazon CloudFormation.

  1. Sign in to the Amazon CloudFormation console.
  2. Select your desired region from the top menu bar.
  3. Click "Create New Stack" at the top left.
  4. Enter "Myrrix" as the Stack Name. Choose "Provide a Template URL", and enter the URL corresponding to your region:

    North Virginia https://s3.amazonaws.com/us-east-1-cf-myrrix/cloud-formation-serving-standalone.json
    Oregon https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/us-west-2-cf-myrrix/cloud-formation-serving-standalone.json
    North California https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/us-west-1-cf-myrrix/cloud-formation-serving-standalone.json
    Ireland https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/eu-west-1-cf-myrrix/cloud-formation-serving-standalone.json
    Singapore https://s3-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com/ap-southeast-1-cf-myrrix/cloud-formation-serving-standalone.json
    Tokyo https://s3-ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com/ap-northeast-1-cf-myrrix/cloud-formation-serving-standalone.json
    Sydney https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/ap-southeast-2-cf-myrrix/cloud-formation-serving-standalone.json
    São Paulo https://s3-sa-east-1.amazonaws.com/sa-east-1-cf-myrrix/cloud-formation-serving-standalone.json


    Click "Continue".

  5. Specify your environment parameters on the following screen:
    Screen Shot 2013-01-27 at 7.54.45 PM

    • AdditionalArgs: additional arguments to the Serving Layer, like --userName=someuser. Use --flag=value syntax instead of --flag value syntax. Because of a current limitation in CloudFormation, it cannot be blank. To specify no value, leave as a single space, which will have no additional effect.
    • SLInstanceType: type of EC2 instance to use with the Serving Layer, if applicable. Defaults to m1.medium.

    6. (If SSH access to the instance is required, download and modify the template instead. Add "KeyName" : "YourKeyName", in the AWS::EC2::Instance declaration.)

  6. On the next screen, review and click "Continue". If you encounter an error like "AccessDenied. User doesn't have permission to call ec2:RunInstances", then the steps above that get access to the DevPay AMI did not complete successfully. Verify that you have subscribed to the AMI.
  7. Your new CloudFormation stack will take 3-5 minutes to start, and its progress can be monitored in the console. Select the stack, then select the "Resources" tab in the pane below to monitor progress of individual steps.
  8. When the stack is fully created, select the "Outputs" tab. You will see the host name the Serving Layer. Simply enter these host names in your browser. Note that it may still take 1-2 minutes after creation for the console to become available.

Note that you will be charged for each hour the instance runs. Use the CloudFront console to delete the stack when done. Note that any information and computed model in the instance will be lost when you do.

Follow the Quick Start Guide to get started making recommendations with your new instance!

Advanced Usage

Note that you can supply any command-line arguments that the Serving Layer accepts by using the "User Data" field, which is described above as a way to specify the --userName and --password flags.

It is possible to log in to the instance directly via SSH. To do so, specify a Key Pair in the launch wizard (generating a new one if necessary), and specify a Security Group that opens the SSH port (22) as well. You will need to download your Key Pair private key as a .pem file. Then you can log in to your instance with the command:

ssh -i [your key].pem ec2-user@[your instance hostname]

The instance puts input files and computed model files in /var/run/myrrix-serving-layer. For example, the instance's computed model, model.bin, can be copied off the instance from this location, and restored to another instance later by pushing the file to this location on a new instance.

It is also possible to modify how the Serving Layer is run. First, obtain root access with sudo bash. Then edit the file /etc/init.d/myrrix-serving-layer as desired, with an editor like vim. It can be restarted with service myrrix-serving-layer restart.