kserve VS kind

Inference servers essentially turn a model running on CPU and/or GPU hardware into a microservice.

Many of them support the kserve API standard[0] that supports everything from model loading/unloading to (of course) inference requests across models, versions, frameworks, etc.

So in the case of Triton[1] you can have any number of different TensorFlow/torch/tensorrt/onnx/etc models, versions, and variants. You can have one or more Triton instances running on hardware with access to local GPUs (for this example). Then you can put standard REST and or grpc load balancers (or whatever you want) in front of them, hit them via another API, whatever.

Now all your applications need to do to perform inference is do an HTTP POST (or use a client[2]) for model input, Triton runs it on a GPU (or CPU if you want), and you get back whatever the model output is.

Not a sales pitch for Triton but it (like some others) can also do things like dynamic batching with QoS parameters, automated model profiling and performance optimization[3], really granular control over resources, response caching, python middleware for application/biz logic, accelerated media processing with Nvidia DALI, all kinds of stuff.

[0] - https://github.com/kserve/kserve

[1] - https://github.com/triton-inference-server/server

[2] - https://github.com/triton-inference-server/client

[3] - https://github.com/triton-inference-server/model_analyzer

Kubeflow has multiple components: central dashboard, Kubeflow Notebooks to manage Jupyter notebooks, Kubeflow Pipelines for building and deploying portable, scalable machine learning (ML) workflows based on Docker containers, KF Serving for model serving (apparently superseded by KServe), Katib for hyperparameter tuning and model search, and training operators such as TFJob for training TF models on Kubernetes.

If you can run on Kubernetes then KFServing is an open source solution that allows for GPU inference and is built upon Knative to allow scale to zero for GPU based inference. From release 0.5 it also has capabilities for multi-model serving as a alpha feature to allow multiple models to share the same server (and via NVIDIA Triton the same GPU).

To get started, you'll need to install clusteradm and kubectl and start up three Kubernetes clusters. To simplify cluster administration, this article starts up three kind clusters with the following names and purposes:

Kind: is a tool for running local Kubernetes clusters using Docker container "nodes." It was primarily designed for testing Kubernetes itself but can also be used for local development or continuous integration.

Fortunately, just as projects like kind and Minikube enable developers to spin up a local Kubernetes environment in no time, CRC, also known as OpenShift Local and a recursive acronym for "CRC - Runs Containers", offers developers a local OpenShift environment by means of a pre-configured VM similar to how Minikube works under the hood.

I recently purchased a used Lenovo M900 Think Centre (i7 with 32GB RAM) from eBay to expand my mini-homelab, which was just a single Synology DS218+ plugged into my ISP's router (yuck!). Since I've been spending a big chunk of time at work playing around with Kubernetes, I figured that I'd put my skills to the test and run a k3s node on the new server. While I was familiar with k3s before starting this project, I'd never actually run it before, opting for tools like kind (and minikube before that) to run small test clusters for my local development work.

Features compared to https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/

Kind allows you to run a Kubernetes cluster inside Docker. This is incredibly useful for developing Helm charts, Operators, or even just testing out different k8s features in a safe way.

Check out KinD

If you're just messing around, just use kind (https://kind.sigs.k8s.io) or minikube if you want VMs (https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io). Both work on ARM-based platforms.

You can also use k3s; it's hella easy to get started with and it works great.

We'll install APIClarity into a Kubernetes cluster to test our API documentation. We're using a Kind cluster for demonstration purposes. Of course, if you have another Kubernetes cluster up and running elsewhere, all steps also work there.

yes I know there is lens, but it does not allow me to see logs of multiple pods at same time and what is even more important it is not friendly for ephemeral clusters - in my case with help of kind I am recreating whole cluster each time from scratch