Skip to main content
Version: 0.14.13

How to configure an Expectation Store to use Amazon S3

By default, newly ProfiledThe act of generating Metrics and candidate Expectations from data. ExpectationsA verifiable assertion about data. are stored as Expectation SuitesA collection of verifiable assertions about data. in JSON format in the expectations/ subdirectory of your great_expectations/ folder. This guide will help you configure Great Expectations to store them in an Amazon S3 bucket.

Prerequisites: This how-to guide assumes you have:

Steps​

1. Configure boto3 to connect to the Amazon S3 bucket where Expectations will be stored​

Instructions on how to set up boto3 with AWS can be found at boto3's documentation site.

2. Identify your Data Context Expectations Store​

As with other StoresA connector to store and retrieve information about metadata in Great Expectations., you can find your Validation Results StoreA connector to store and retrieve information about objects generated when data is Validated against an Expectation Suite. with your Data ContextThe primary entry point for a Great Expectations deployment, with configurations and methods for all supporting components.. In your great_expectations.yml , look for the following lines. The configuration tells Great Expectations to look for Expectations in a store called expectations_store. The base_directory for expectations_store is set to expectations/ by default.

expectations_store_name: expectations_store

stores:
  expectations_store:
      class_name: ExpectationsStore
      store_backend:
          class_name: TupleFilesystemStoreBackend
          base_directory: expectations/

3. Update your configuration file to include a new Store for Expectations on S3​

In our case, the Expectations StoreA connector to store and retrieve information about collections of verifiable assertions about data. name is set to expectations_S3_store, but it can be any name you like. We also need to make some changes to the store_backend settings. The class_name will be set to TupleS3StoreBackend, bucket will be set to the address of your S3 bucket, and prefix will be set to the folder where Expectation files will be located.

danger

If you are also storing Validations in S3 or DataDocs in S3, please ensure that the prefix values are disjoint and one is not a substring of the other.

expectations_store_name: expectations_S3_store

stores:
  expectations_S3_store:
      class_name: ExpectationsStore
      store_backend:
          class_name: TupleS3StoreBackend
          bucket: '<your_s3_bucket_name>'
          prefix: '<your_s3_bucket_folder_name>'

4. Copy existing Expectation JSON files to the S3 bucket (This step is optional)​

One way to copy Expectations into Amazon S3 is by using the aws s3 sync command. As mentioned earlier, the base_directory is set to expectations/ by default. In the example below, two Expectations, exp1 and exp2 are copied to Amazon S3. Your output should looks something like this:

aws s3 sync '<base_directory>' s3://'<your_s3_bucket_name>'/'<your_s3_bucket_folder_name>'

upload: ./exp1.json to s3://'<your_s3_bucket_name>'/'<your_s3_bucket_folder_name>'/exp1.json
upload: ./exp2.json to s3://'<your_s3_bucket_name>'/'<your_s3_bucket_folder_name>'/exp2.json

5. Confirm that the new Expectations Store has been added by running great_expectations store list​

Notice the output contains two Expectation Stores: the original expectations_store on the local filesystem and the expectations_S3_store we just configured. This is ok, since Great Expectations will look for Expectations in the S3 bucket as long as we set the expectations_store_name variable to expectations_S3_store.

great_expectations store list

- name: expectations_store
class_name: ExpectationsStore
store_backend:
  class_name: TupleFilesystemStoreBackend
  base_directory: expectations/

- name: expectations_S3_store
class_name: ExpectationsStore
store_backend:
  class_name: TupleS3StoreBackend
  bucket: '<your_s3_bucket_name>'
  prefix: '<your_s3_bucket_folder_name>'

6. Confirm that Expectations can be accessed from Amazon S3 by running great_expectations suite list​

If you followed Step 4, The output should include the 2 Expectations we copied to Amazon S3: exp1 and exp2. If you did not copy Expectations to the new Store, you will see a message saying no Expectations were found.

great_expectations suite list

2 Expectation Suites found:
- exp1
- exp2