soopervisor VS kserve

Hi, we’re Ido & Eduardo, the founders of Ploomber. We’re launching Ploomber Cloud today, a service that allows data scientists to scale their work from their laptops to the cloud.

Our open-source users (https://github.com/ploomber/ploomber) usually start their work on their laptops; however, often, their local environment falls short, and they need more resources. Typical use cases run out of memory or optimize models to squeeze out the best performance. Ploomber Cloud eases this transition by allowing users to quickly move their existing projects into the cloud without extra configurations. Furthermore, users can request custom resources for specific tasks (vCPUs, GPUs, RAM).

Both of us experienced this challenge firsthand. Analysis usually starts in a local notebook or script, and whenever we wanted to run our code on a larger infrastructure we had to refactor the code (i.e. rewrite our notebooks using Kubeflow’s SDK) and add a bunch of cloud configurations. Ploomber Cloud is a lot simpler, if your notebook or script runs locally, you can run it in the cloud with no code changes and no extra configuration. Furthermore, you can go back and forth between your local/interactive environment and the cloud.

We built Ploomber Cloud on top of AWS. Users only need to declare their dependencies via a requirements.txt file, and Ploomber Cloud will take care of making the Docker image and storing it on ECR. Part of this implementation is open-source and available at: https://github.com/ploomber/soopervisor

Once the Docker image is ready, we spin up EC2 instances to run the user’s pipeline distributively (for example, to run hundreds of ML experiments in parallel) and store the results in S3. Users can monitor execution through the logs and download artifacts. If source code hasn’t changed for a given pipeline task, we use cached artifacts and skip redundant computations, severely cutting each run's cost, especially for pipelines that require GPUs.

Users can sign up to Ploomber Cloud for free and get started quickly. We made a significant effort to simplify the experience (https://docs.ploomber.io/en/latest/cloud/index.html). There are three plans (https://ploomber.io/pricing/): the first is the Community plan, which is free with limited computing. The Teams plan has a flat $50 monthly and usage-based billing, and the Enterprise plan includes SLAs and custom pricing.

We’re thrilled to share Ploomber Cloud with you! So if you’re a data scientist who has experienced these endless cycles of getting a machine and going through an ops team, an ML engineer who helps data scientists scale their work, or you have any feedback, please share your thoughts! We love discussing these problems since exchanging ideas sparks exciting discussions and brings our attention to issues we haven’t considered before!

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).