Deploy MAX models to the cloud with Kubernetes

Learning objective

This tutorial explains how to use a Kubernetes system to deploy a cloud instance for your Model Asset Exchange (MAX) model. The Kubernetes service lets you easily scale the containerized model from supporting a low rate of queries to production-level queries. The free IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is limited to 1 worker, but this works fine for this application. Let’s get started!

Prerequisites

If you are not familiar with the Model Asset Exchange, this introductory article provides a good overview.

Additionally, you need the following:

• An IBM Cloud account. You can sign up for a free account.
• An available Kubernetes cluster on your IBM Cloud account. The free cluster type will suffice. Create a Kubernetes cluster from the IBM Cloud catalog.
• The IBM Cloud command-line interface (CLI) installed. After creating a Cloud account and a Kubernetes cluster, you must communicate with the cluster using your local machine. Installation instructions are available, or you can perform a web search for ‘IBM Cloud CLI.’

Estimated time

With the prerequisites available, it should take you approximately 20 minutes to complete this tutorial.

Steps

This tutorial consists of the following steps:

1. Accessing the Kubernetes cluster
2. Deploying the MAX model

A troubleshooting section can be found at the end of this tutorial.

Step 1. Accessing the Kubernetes cluster

With an IBM Cloud account available, a Kubernetes cluster created, and the Cloud CLI installed (see Prerequisites), the actual deployment step itself is the easiest part. Begin by establishing the connection between your local machine and the Kubernetes cluster.

Use the CLI to log in to IBM Cloud on your local machine and specify what cluster you are targeting in the cloud. All of these instructions are also available under the Access tab on the online page of your Kubernetes cluster. Go to this Access tab to ensure that you are working with the most up-to-date instructions.

Now, execute the instructions.

1. Log in to the cluster from your local machine.

    ibmcloud login -a https://cloud.ibm.com
   

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2. Set the IBM Cloud region to the Kubernetes Service region that you selected when creating your cluster. The example cluster is in US South, but you can find information on other regions.

    ibmcloud ks region-set us-south
   

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3. Get the command to set the environment variable and download the Kubernetes configuration files to the cluster.

   Note: Replace the last argument (max-deployment-cluster) with the name you gave your Kubernetes cluster.

    ibmcloud ks cluster-config max-deployment-cluster
   

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4. Copy the output from the previous command and paste it in your terminal. The command starts with export KUBECONFIG=.... This command must be run because it sets the required KUBECONFIG environment variable.

5. Verify that you can connect to your cluster by listing your worker nodes. The kubectl commands are part of the Kubernetes CLI, which was installed in the same process as the IBM Cloud CLI. If the kubectl command returns command not found, you must install the Kubernetes CLI plug-in separately. More information on installing the plug-in separately can be found in the Troubleshooting section at the end of this tutorial.

   kubectl get nodes
   

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You are now ready for the final step of the deployment.

Step 2. Deploying the MAX model

The actual deployment process is short. Now that the connection with the remote Kubernetes cluster has been set up, you only have to apply the model’s configuration file to the Kubernetes cluster to get the API up and running.

Let’s download the model’s repository, which contains the YAML configuration file.

1. Clone the MAX-Model repository from GitHub. The following code shows how to do this for the MAX-Object-Detector, but you can replace MAX-Object-Detector with whichever MAX Model you want to use.

    git clone https://github.com/IBM/MAX-Object-Detector.git
   

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2. Find the .yaml file in the downloaded directory.

    cd MAX-Object-Detector
   
    ls *.yaml
   

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3. Apply the configuration file to your Kubernetes cluster. Again, replace the max-object-detector.yaml with the .yaml file corresponding to your model. The following command deploys the model.

    kubectl apply -f ./max-object-detector.yaml
   

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4. After the model is deployed (give it some time), find the public IP address and port that the API is served on.

   • The public IP

       ibmcloud cs workers mycluster
     

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   • The port

     Note: Replace max-object-detector with the service name corresponding to your model.

       kubectl describe service max-object-detector | grep NodePort
     

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5. Navigate to the http://<PUBLIC_IP>:<PORT> address in your browser. You should find the API front end as shown in the following image.

This means that the MAX model has been successfully deployed. Congratulations!

Some useful commands

Kubernetes CLI:

# Show the log of all events
kubectl get events

# Show all pods
kubectl get pods

# Show all services
kubectl get services

# Show all deployments
kubectl get deployments

# Show the details of a service
kubectl describe service SERVICE_NAME

# Show the details of a node
kubectl describe node NODE_NAME

# Delete a service
kubectl delete services SERVICE_NAME

# Delete a deployment
kubectl delete deployment DEPLOYMENT_NAME

# Debugging a pod
kubectl logs POD_NAME

IBM Cloud CLI:

# Show all clusters
ibmcloud cs clusters

# Show the workers of a specific cluster
ibmcloud cs workers CLUSTER_NAME

Further scaling

Scaling a Kubernetes-powered application beyond the 2vCPU and 4 GB RAM specifications of the free cluster is as easy as clicking a button. Adding worker nodes (computation units) or specifying advanced cluster parameters (for example, more CPU or RAM) can be done easily from the Cloud Dashboard. However, you must upgrade to a standard cluster to access these.

Additionally, with more worker nodes, a single node’s public IP address does not suffice. Therefore, services like Ingress and Loadbalancer must be added as well. Exposing a public IP address on the deployment level instead of on the node level with the Loadbalancer can be set up in a few easy steps as demonstrated below.

1. Show the existing deployments and note the deployment name.

    kubectl get deployments
   

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2. With the deployment name, you can expose this deployment to a public IP address and port by using the following command. Replace <DEPLOYMENT_NAME> with the name of the deployment, and replace <SERVICE_NAME> with a custom name for your microservice. The target-port flag points to the port of the running container, which is set to 5000 by default for MAX models. The port that you want to expose on the public IP address can be set with the port flag. Here, it’s specified as 80.

    kubectl expose deployment <DEPLOYMENT_NAME> --port=80 --target-port=5000 --name=<SERVICE_NAME> --type=LoadBalancer --load-balancer-ip=''
   

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3. The public IP and port are now being configured as part of the service. When done (it can be a couple of minutes), the external IP address shows up in the output of the following command.

    kubectl get service --watch
   

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4. You can verify that your service is up and running by typing the IP address and port in the browser like http://<IP>:<PORT>.

More information can be found in the Deploy a MAX model-serving microservice on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service GitHub repository.

Troubleshooting

An easy way to detect general issues with your Kubernetes cluster is to visit the Kubernetes Dashboard on IBM Cloud. Any critical or pending worker nodes are highlighted. In addition, you can run the following commands in the terminal.

• Check Kubernetes events

    kubectl get events
  

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• Get the logs for a pod

    kubectl logs POD_NAME
  

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Memory issues and killed containers

When trying to deploy a model with above-average memory requirements (for example, the MAX-Image-Resolution-Enhancer), you will run into a TypeError: Failed to fetch error message. Although the front end is still responsive, this error often means that the container was killed and restarted due to exceeding the memory limit after posting an input image. In this case, you must upgrade to a standard Kubernetes cluster to choose the specifications of the worker nodes. Increasing the resources of the node solves this issue.

Can’t find the kubectl command

Most likely, this means that you are working with an older version of the IBM Cloud CLI for which the Kubernetes CLI was not included in the package. Verify that the container-service/kubernetes-service plug-in is not present by running the ibmcloud plugin list command. Run the ibmcloud plugin install container-service command to install the plug-in, or reinstall the IBM Cloud CLI. You can find more information on the official Kubernetes page or on the IBM Cloud CLI page.

Summary

This tutorial illustrates how to deploy a model container from the Model Asset Exchange to IBM Cloud using Kubernetes by following two easy steps: accessing the Kubernetes cluster and deploying the MAX model.