Kubernetes (often abbreviated as K8s) is an open-source platform for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It organizes and schedules containers across a cluster of machines, ensuring that they run efficiently, remain available, and can be easily scaled as needed.
Kubernetes was originally developed by Google, but it is now maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a part of the Linux Foundation.
In the AI context:
Kubernetes plays a significant role in AI for several reasons:
- Scaling AI Workloads: AI models, especially during training, often require large amounts of compute power. Kubernetes allows for easy scaling of AI workloads by distributing containers across multiple nodes in a cluster.
- Resource Management: Kubernetes manages the underlying infrastructure resources efficiently, optimizing CPU, GPU, and memory usage, which is crucial for AI tasks like model training and inference that require high-performance computing.
- High Availability and Fault Tolerance: AI applications need to run continuously and reliably. Kubernetes ensures high availability by automatically restarting or replacing containers if they fail, reducing downtime for AI services.
- Easy Model Deployment: Kubernetes simplifies the deployment of AI models in production environments. It can automate rolling updates of models and ensure that new versions run without affecting existing services.
- Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Flexibility: AI workloads can be resource-intensive, and Kubernetes provides the flexibility to run these workloads across on-premise, hybrid, or multi-cloud environments.
In summary, Kubernetes helps AI teams manage and scale containerized AI workloads efficiently while ensuring high availability and optimal use of resources.
It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery. Kubernetes builds upon 15 years of experience of running production workloads at Google, combined with best-of-breed ideas and practices from the community.
Planet Scale Designed on the same principles that allow Google to run billions of containers a week, Kubernetes can scale without increasing your operations team.