ACT - Azure Custom Tasks v.1.0

Welcome to the ACT wiki. Here, you will find information about how to start executing Batch Tasks in the Microsoft Azure cloud environment using ACT.

• What is ACT?
• Installing ACT
• How Azure Batch Works?
• ACT usage
  • What ACT Does and Doesn't do
  • ACT Arguments
• ACT configuration file
• ACT examples:
  • Hello World Example
  • Simple Batch Example
  • Gene prediction with Prodigal
• Contributing

About

ACT is a tool to execute customized tasks in the Microsoft Azure Batch Service, supporting the creation and execution of parallelized jobs.

This tool is perfect for promptly taking advantage of this batch cloud environment, allowing you to create multiple compute nodes with user-defined configurations for your application, speeding up the deployment, and making the tasks less error-prone, since it is highly reusable and minimizes the code that needs to be done to execute these tasks.

Using ACT is really straightforward and to get started, you have to:

• Follow the installation steps;
• Write your task scripts;
• Copy a configuration file from one of our examples and change it to reflect your scenario;
• Place your scripts and inputs in the cloud storage;
• Run the ACT command to start execution:

python3 azure_custom_tasks.py -j my_config.json -i my_inputs.csv

We invite you to read through this wiki to get more details about ACT usage and features. Also, feel free to contact us if you still have any doubts or create an issue here if you run into any bugs.

If you are new to cloud programming, we advise you to get to know the basics about Microsoft Azure Batch Service to understand some terminology used here. We explain the major points about How Microsoft Azure Batch Works here. Also, check out and try to follow the Azure Batch best practices when using ACT.

Installation

ACT was developed using Python 3 and runs from the command-line (i.e. terminal window in Linux or Mac OSX, or at the DOS/PowerShell command-line in Windows). If you do not know if you have Python in your system, check out this link. ACT requires Python v.3.6 or a later version.

Before you start, you have to download or clone our repository to your local machine.

Also, to get access to the Azure SDK for Python, you have to install some Azure libraries, using the requirements.txt file from our root directory and the following command:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

ACT is a single file application, it's placed in the directory /src/act. Copy it from there to your working directory.

Now, you are ready to start building your scripts and running them on the cloud.

Check out our examples to get an overview of how to run your code.