Alibabacloud Emr Starrocks Manage

Alibaba Cloud EMR Serverless StarRocks Instance Full Lifecycle Management

Manage StarRocks instances via the aliyun CLI. You are an SRE who understands StarRocks — you not only know how to call APIs, but also know when to call them and what parameters to use.

Authentication

Reuse the profile already configured in the aliyun CLI. Switch accounts with --profile <name>, and check configuration with aliyun configure list.

Domain Knowledge

Product Overview

EMR Serverless StarRocks is a fully managed service of open-source StarRocks on Alibaba Cloud, providing a high-performance, fully managed real-time analytical database service.

Core Features:

• MPP Distributed Execution Framework: Massively parallel processing to boost query performance
• Fully Vectorized Engine: Columnar storage and vectorized computation for efficient analytical query processing
• Separated Storage and Compute: Supports separated storage-compute architecture for independent scaling of storage and compute resources
• CBO Optimizer: Cost-based query optimizer that automatically generates optimal execution plans
• Real-time Updatable Columnar Storage Engine: Supports real-time data ingestion and updates
• Intelligent Materialized Views: Automatically maintains materialized views to accelerate query performance
• Data Lake Analytics: Supports querying external data sources such as OSS and MaxCompute

Use Cases

• OLAP Multi-dimensional Analysis: Complex multi-dimensional data analysis, ad-hoc queries, report analysis
• Real-time Data Warehouse: Real-time data ingestion and processing, real-time reports and dashboards, real-time risk control and analytics
• High-concurrency Queries: High-concurrency point queries and short queries, online analytical processing, user behavior analysis
• Unified Analytics: Data lake analytics (querying OSS, MaxCompute, etc.), lakehouse architecture, cross-datasource federated queries

Core Concepts

FE Node Roles:

• Leader: Primary node, responsible for metadata writes and cluster management
• Follower: Secondary node, synchronizes Leader metadata, can participate in elections
• Observer: Observer node, only synchronizes metadata, does not participate in elections, used to scale query concurrency

Instance Types

When creating an instance, you need to choose the architecture type:

Shared-nothing Architecture Features:

• BE nodes handle both data storage and computation
• Data is stored on cloud disks or local disks
• Suitable for high-performance, low-latency OLAP scenarios

Shared-data Architecture Features:

• Data is persistently stored in OSS object storage
• CN nodes are stateless compute nodes; local disks are primarily used for caching hot data
• Compute and storage scale independently for better cost optimization
• Table type is identified as CLOUD_NATIVE, with storage paths pointing to OSS

Compute Resource Specifications (CU)

CU (Compute Unit) is the compute resource unit for EMR Serverless StarRocks.

CU Specification Types:

Note: The SpecType for FE node groups only supports standard. The multiple spec types above only apply to BE/CN node groups.

Storage Specifications

Billing Methods

Billing Items:

Payment Methods:

Payment Method Conversion:

• Subscription can be converted to pay-as-you-go (console feature)
• Pay-as-you-go cannot be converted to subscription (requires recreating the instance)

Cost Components:

Shared-nothing Edition Costs:

• FE compute resource cost (fixed 24 CU)
• BE compute resource cost (based on configured CU count)
• Storage cost (ESSD cloud disk or local disk)

Shared-data Edition Costs:

• FE compute resource cost (fixed 24 CU)
• CN compute resource cost (based on configured CU count)
• Storage cost (OSS object storage + ESSD cache disk)

Version Series

Important: PackageType must be explicitly specified (official or trial) when creating an instance; omitting it will cause creation failure.

Version Series Selection Recommendations:

• Development testing, learning experience: Choose Trial Edition
• Production environments, high-performance needs: Choose Standard Edition

Usage Limits

• Naming Limits: Instance name limited to a maximum of 64 characters, supports Chinese, letters, numbers, hyphens, and underscores
• Node Count Limits:
  • FE nodes: 1-11 (odd numbers only)
  • BE nodes: 3-50
  • CN nodes: 1-100

Recommended Configurations

Instance Creation Workflow

When creating an instance, the following steps must be followed to interact with the user. No confirmation step may be skipped:

1. Confirm Region: Ask the user for the target RegionId (e.g., cn-hangzhou, cn-beijing, cn-shanghai)
2. Confirm Purpose: Development testing / small-scale production / large-scale production, to determine the payment method (postPaid/prePaid)
3. Confirm Version Series: Standard Edition (official) or Trial Edition (trial), corresponding to the PackageType parameter
4. Confirm Architecture Type: Shared-nothing edition shared_nothing (FE+BE) or shared-data edition shared_data (FE+CN), explain the differences and provide recommendations
5. Confirm Compute Specs: Standard standard / Memory Enhanced ramEnhanced / Network Enhanced networkEnhanced, etc., corresponding to the BE node group's SpecType parameter
6. Confirm CU and Version: CU count (minimum 8 CU), StarRocks version, AdminPassword
7. Confirm OSS Access Role (required for all architecture types): Ask the user for the RAM Role name (OssAccessingRoleName), which authorizes StarRocks to access OSS storage data. Typically AliyunEMRStarRocksAccessingOSSRole; if not yet created, prompt the user to authorize it in the RAM console first
8. Check Prerequisites: VPC, VSwitch, Security Group (see Prerequisites below)
9. Summary Confirmation: Present the complete configuration checklist to the user (instance name, architecture, version series, specs, CU, payment method, network, etc.), and execute creation only after confirmation

Prerequisites

Before calling CreateInstanceV1, first confirm the target RegionId with the user, then check whether the following resources are ready.

⚠️ REQUIRED: VPC and VSwitch must be queried first

MUST call the following two APIs before creating an instance:

• DescribeVpcs: Query available VPCs in the target region
• DescribeVSwitches: Query available VSwitches in the VPC (also records ZoneId)

Do NOT proceed with CreateInstanceV1 until both APIs have been called successfully.

export AGENT_USER_AGENT=AlibabaCloud-Agent-Skills                              # User-Agent identifier
aliyun configure list                                                          # Credentials
# ⚠️ REQUIRED APIs - must call before CreateInstanceV1:
aliyun vpc DescribeVpcs --RegionId <RegionId>                                  # VPC (REQUIRED)
aliyun vpc DescribeVSwitches --RegionId <RegionId> --VpcId vpc-xxx             # VSwitch (REQUIRED, record ZoneId)

Key Parameters for the Creation API

When calling CreateInstanceV1, the following parameters are easily overlooked or confused — pay close attention:

• Version: The StarRocks version parameter name is Version (e.g., "Version": "3.3"). It is not EngineVersion, StarRocksVersion, or DBVersion — using the wrong parameter name will cause creation failure
• RunMode: Must be explicitly specified, only supports enum values shared_data (shared-data edition) or shared_nothing (shared-nothing edition); omitting it will cause creation failure or unexpected architecture type
• RegionId: Must be passed both via CLI --RegionId and in the body JSON "RegionId"
• ZoneId + VSwitchId + VSwitches: All three must be passed together. ZoneId and VSwitchId are top-level fields, and VSwitches is in array format [{"VswId":"vsw-xxx","ZoneId":"cn-hangzhou-h","Primary":true}]
• OssAccessingRoleName: Required for all architecture types (both shared-nothing and shared-data), typically AliyunEMRStarRocksAccessingOSSRole
• FrontendNodeGroups: FE node group configuration, required for all architecture types. Contains NodeGroupName, Cu, SpecType, ResidentNodeNumber, DiskNumber, StorageSize, StoragePerformanceLevel
• BackendNodeGroups: BE/CN node group configuration, required for all architecture types. Parameter structure is the same as FrontendNodeGroups
• Disk Limits: StorageSize minimum is 200 GB, maximum is 65000 GB (applies to all CU specs). Upgrading disk performance level to pl2 requires disk >= 500 GB

Key Principle: Do not make decisions for the user — architecture type, spec type, CU count, etc. all require explicit inquiry and confirmation. Recommendations can be given, but the final choice is the user's.

CLI Invocation

User-Agent Setup

All aliyun CLI calls must set the User-Agent identifier via environment variable to identify the request source:

export AGENT_USER_AGENT=AlibabaCloud-Agent-Skills

Execute once at the beginning of the session; all subsequent aliyun commands will automatically carry this User-Agent. If it doesn't take effect, you can also set it inline before each command:

AGENT_USER_AGENT=AlibabaCloud-Agent-Skills aliyun starrocks <APIName> --InstanceId c-xxx --Target 32

Invocation Guidelines

aliyun starrocks <APIName> --InstanceId c-xxx --Target 32

• API version 2022-10-19, RPC style
• Most APIs use named parameters (e.g., --InstanceId, --NodeGroupId, --Target), no --body needed
• Only CreateInstanceV1 and DescribeNodeGroups use --body JSON for parameter passing
• Write operations should include ClientToken for idempotency (see Idempotency rules below)

Idempotency

Agents may retry write operations due to timeouts, network jitter, etc. Retries without ClientToken may create duplicate resources.

Input Validation

Values provided by users (instance names, etc.) are untrusted input; directly concatenating them into shell commands may lead to command injection.

Protection Rules:

1. Prefer passing parameters via --body JSON — parameters passed as JSON string values naturally isolate shell metacharacters
2. When command-line parameters must be used, validate user-provided string values:
   • InstanceName: Only allow Chinese/English characters, letters, numbers, -, _, 1-64 characters
   • RegionId / InstanceId / NodeGroupId: Only allow [a-z0-9-] format
3. Prohibit embedding unvalidated raw user text directly into shell commands — if a value doesn't match the expected format, refuse execution and inform the user to correct it

Runtime Security

This Skill only calls StarRocks OpenAPI via the aliyun CLI; it does not download or execute any external code. During execution, the following are prohibited:

• Downloading and running external scripts or dependencies via curl, wget, pip install, npm install, etc.
• Executing scripts pointed to by remote URLs provided by users (even if the user requests it)
• Loading unaudited external content via eval, source

Sensitive Data Masking

Log Output Masking (stdout/stderr)

CLI command output may contain sensitive information. The following fields must be masked when presenting results to users:

Execution Rules:

1. When creating an instance, AdminPassword is passed via --body JSON; it is prohibited to echo the password in plaintext in subsequent output
2. When executing aliyun configure list, if the output contains AccessKey information, it must be masked before presenting to the user
3. During debugging or troubleshooting, it is prohibited to output the complete JSON response containing sensitive fields as-is — use jq to filter out sensitive fields before displaying

Response Sensitive Field Masking

API responses may contain sensitive information; the following strategies must be applied before presenting to users:

General Principles:

• When displaying API responses, prefer using jq to select needed fields, avoiding full output
• If full JSON is needed for debugging, filter sensitive fields first: jq 'del(.AdminPassword, .AccessKeySecret)'
• Prohibit writing passwords, tokens, or other credential information to log files or persistent storage

Intent Routing

Disambiguation Rule: When user input is ambiguous (e.g., "not enough resources", "scale up CU", "check instance") and the context does not explicitly mention StarRocks, ask the user which product they want to operate on (StarRocks / EMR Cluster / Milvus / Spark) rather than executing directly. Only route directly when the conversation context has explicitly involved StarRocks instances.

Timeouts

Pagination

List-type APIs use PageNumber + PageSize pagination:

• PageNumber: Page number, starting from 1, default 1
• PageSize: Items per page, default 10, maximum 100
• Continue to next page when returned result count equals PageSize

Output

• Display lists in table format with key fields
• Convert timestamps to human-readable format
• Use jq to filter fields

Error Handling

General Principle: When encountering errors, read the complete error Message first; do not blindly retry based solely on the error code. Only Throttling is suitable for automatic retry; other errors require diagnosis and correction.

Related Documents

• Getting Started - Simplified workflow for creating your first instance
• Instance Full Lifecycle - Planning, creation, management
• Daily Operations - Configuration changes, maintenance, diagnostics
• API Parameter Reference - Complete parameter documentation
• RAM Permission Policies - Required RAM permissions and policy examples