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Key Kubernetes Challenges for AI/ML in the Enterprise - Part 1

This blog is based on our learnings over the last two years as we worked very closely with our customers that make extensive use of Kubernetes for AI/ML.

This is part-1 of a two part series. In part-1, we will

  • Start by looking at why Kubernetes is particularly compelling for AI/ML.
  • Describe some of the key challenges that organizations will encounter with AI/ML and Kubernetes

In part-2, we will look at ways by which organizations can address these challenges.

Announcing our April 2023 (v1.24) Release

A few weeks back in early April 2023, we upgraded our Preview environment to v1.24 of the Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform. Our sincere thanks to our customers and partners that have been actively testing the new functionality. We have received timely feedback that we have been able to incorporate into our product documentation and into the platform as well.

Today, we upgraded our Production environment to this release. As always, our customers will have seamless access to the new functionality with no interruptions to their applications or clusters. In this blog, I will describe some of the new features that are part of this release.

April Release v1.24

How Platform Teams can enable developers to use their preferred Kubernetes Tools

There are cases where developers may prefer to use tools on their laptops such as Lens Desktop to visualize resources and interact with Kubernetes clusters. The use of a desktop based app such as Lens can be a better user experience for developers over the Kubectl CLI.

In this blog, we will describe how Platform Teams can use Rafay’s Zero-Trust Access service to enable developers to use popular Kubernetes visualization apps to troubleshoot their applications. Watch a video showing how a developer can use Lens Desktop with Rafay's Zero Trust Kubectl Access service to securely and remotely access Kubernetes clusters.

Goldilocks Zone for AKS

In this blog, we will look at the process used by Microsoft Azure to add support for new Kubernetes versions for their "Managed" Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). We will also look at recommendations for customers on things they need to consider to operate their AKS clusters at scale without issues.

Azure's AKS managed Kubernetes is supported globally in 60+ regions. As one can imagine, it is not practical to update software in all these regions in one fell swoop. The AKS team at Microsoft employs a Safe Deployment Practice (SDP) where new releases are rolled out gradually in phases. This means that any given time, something new is being rolled out to some region.

Note

The AKS team maintains a Release Tracker that provides visibility to customers that require it.

Considerations for In-Place Upgrades to Amazon EKS v1.24

Recently, AWS added support for Kubernetes v1.24 for their Amazon EKS offering. One significant change with this version is the removal of Dockershim as the Container Runtime (CRI). Amazon EKS clusters v1.24 onwards are standardized on "containerd".

New Amazon EKS v1.24 clusters are provisioned with containerd. Watch a brief video showcasing how customers can use Rafay to configure and provision an Amazon EKS v1.24 cluster.

When EKS clusters are upgraded to v1.24, the nodes in the EKS cluster's data plane are seamlessly migrated from "Dockershim" to "containerd". 

graph LR
  A[Dockershim] --> B[Containerd];

Although this transition is mostly "behind the scenes" for users, the transition from Dockershim -> Containerd can cause disruptions to deployed applications that may be dependent on Docker. In this blog, we will look at what Rafay has done to protect our customers during an in-place upgrade to EKS v1.24.

Considerations for Windows Containers on Kubernetes

With increasing adoption of Kubernetes in organizations, we are seeing interest from a number of customers that would like to deploy and operate their "legacy Windows applications" on Kubernetes as well.

In this blog, we have attempted to capture our learnings from working with customers that use the Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform to deploy and operate Kubernetes clusters with Windows based containerized applications.

Kubernetes Cluster Insights for Platform Teams

Many customers of the Rafay Kubernetes Operations Platform are "Platform Teams". In many cases, the first priority for these platform teams is to "take over and standardize" existing Kubernetes clusters in active use by application teams.

However, one of the challenges they run into with the take over process is nobody in the team has complete clarity into what resources already exist on the cluster and for what purpose. Identifying an accurate list manually can be extremely error prone and time consuming for both the platform teams as well as the various application teams resulting in delays in adoption and standardization efforts.

Deploying Backstage in Kubernetes With Enterprise-Grade Governance and Automation

Introduction To Backstage

Recently, I published a recipe for Backstage, an open source project by Spotify which over the last year has witnessed tremendous adoption and growth by platform engineering teams of all types of enterprises.

Some of the key features of Backstage include:

  • an easy-to-use interface for developers
  • extensible plugin ecosystem (for ex. plugins available for GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, AWS, and more)
  • ability to easily build and publish tech documentation
  • native Kubernetes plugin for cloud-native apps
  • ability to compose different developer workflows into an Internal Developer Portal (IDP)