Docker offers a standardized approach to packaging machine learning applications into portable containers. However, running these containers at scale introduces a new set of challenges. How do you deploy and manage hundreds of containers for a distributed training job? How do you ensure your model serving API is always available, even if an underlying machine fails? Manually managing these tasks across multiple servers is inefficient and prone to error.
This is where a container orchestrator like Kubernetes comes in. Originally developed by Google and now maintained by the Cloud Native computing Foundation (CNCF), Kubernetes automates the deployment, scaling, and operational management of containerized applications. It acts as the operating system for a cluster of machines, abstracting away the underlying hardware and providing a unified API to manage your workloads. Instead of managing individual machines, you manage a shared pool of resources.
For ML engineers and MLOps professionals, Kubernetes offers a powerful platform to solve several common problems in the machine learning lifecycle. It provides a consistent foundation for experimentation, training, and deployment.
Scalability for Demanding Workloads: ML training jobs, especially for large models, often need to run across multiple machines to complete in a reasonable time. Kubernetes can scale the number of container replicas for a training job with a single command. Likewise, if your model serving endpoint experiences high traffic, Kubernetes can automatically scale out the number of inference containers to handle the load and scale them back down when traffic subsides.
Efficient Resource Management: ML applications are resource-hungry, often requiring specific amounts of CPU, memory, and, most importantly, GPUs. Kubernetes allows you to define resource requests and limits for each workload. This ensures that a critical training job gets the GPU it needs, while preventing an experimental notebook from consuming all the cluster's resources. It enables a fine-grained control over expensive hardware.
Portability and Consistency: Just as Docker provides consistency for a single application, Kubernetes provides consistency for an entire system. You can define your complete ML stack, a training pipeline, a model serving API, a monitoring dashboard, in a set of declarative configuration files (typically written in YAML). This entire stack can then be deployed on any Kubernetes cluster, whether it's running on-premise, on AWS, GCP, or Azure, ensuring your environment is reproducible everywhere.
Resilience and Self-Healing: Long-running training jobs can be interrupted by hardware failures or other transient issues. Kubernetes automatically monitors the health of your containers and will restart any that fail. For a deployed model, it can maintain a specified number of running replicas, automatically replacing any that crash. This self-healing capability is significant for building reliable ML systems.
The fundamental shift when using Kubernetes is from thinking about individual machines to thinking about a unified cluster. You declare the state you want for your application, and Kubernetes's control plane works to make it a reality by scheduling work across all the available worker machines, which are called Nodes.
The engineer defines the application's desired state in YAML files and sends it to the Control Plane. The Control Plane's scheduler then finds appropriate Worker Nodes to run the application's components inside of Pods, allocating resources like GPUs where needed.
You interact with Kubernetes using a declarative approach. Instead of writing scripts to issue a sequence of commands, you create configuration files that declare the desired state of your application. For example, you might declare: "I want three replicas of my model-serving container running, and it should be accessible to the public internet." Kubernetes continuously works to match the actual state of the cluster to your declared state.
To make this happen, Kubernetes is built on a few core components, which we will examine in detail in the next section:
With this understanding of what Kubernetes is and why it's a fitting platform for machine learning, we can now examine the specific objects you'll use to define and deploy your applications.
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