Kubernetes Orchestrator

Orchestrating your pipelines to run on Kubernetes clusters.

This is an older version of the ZenML documentation. To read and view the latest version please visit this up-to-date URL.

Kubernetes Orchestrator

The Kubernetes orchestrator is an orchestrator flavor provided with the ZenML kubernetes integration that runs your pipelines on a Kubernetes cluster.

This component is only meant to be used within the context of a remote ZenML deployment scenario. Usage with a local ZenML deployment may lead to unexpected behavior!

When to use it

You should use the Kubernetes orchestrator if:

• you're looking lightweight way of running your pipelines on Kubernetes.

• you don't need a UI to list all your pipeline runs.

• you're not willing to maintain Kubeflow Pipelines on your Kubernetes cluster.

• you're not interested in paying for managed solutions like Vertex.

How to deploy it

The Kubernetes orchestrator requires a Kubernetes cluster in order to run. There are many ways to deploy a Kubernetes cluster using different cloud providers or on your custom infrastructure, and we can't possibly cover all of them, but you can check out our cloud guide

If the above Kubernetes cluster is deployed remotely on the cloud, then another pre-requisite to use this orchestrator would be to deploy and connect to a remote ZenML server.

Infrastructure Deployment

A Kubernetes orchestrator can be deployed directly from the ZenML CLI:

zenml orchestrator deploy k8s_orchestrator --flavor=kubernetes ...

You can pass other configurations specific to the stack components as key-value arguments. If you don't provide a name, a random one is generated for you. For more information about how to work use the CLI for this, please refer to the dedicated documentation section.

How to use it

To use the Kubernetes orchestrator, we need:

• The ZenML kubernetes integration installed. If you haven't done so, run

  zenml integration install kubernetes

• Docker installed and running.

• kubectl installed.

• A remote artifact store as part of your stack.

• A remote container registry as part of your stack.

• A Kubernetes cluster deployed

• kubectl installed and the name of the Kubernetes configuration context which points to the target cluster (i.e. runkubectl config get-contexts to see a list of available contexts) . This is optional (see below).

It is recommended that you set up a Service Connector and use it to connect ZenML Stack Components to the remote Kubernetes cluster, especially If you are using a Kubernetes cluster managed by a cloud provider like AWS, GCP or Azure, This guarantees that your Stack is fully portable on other environments and your pipelines are fully reproducible.

We can then register the orchestrator and use it in our active stack. This can be done in two ways:

1. If you have a Service Connector configured to access the remote Kubernetes cluster, you no longer need to set the kubernetes_context attribute to a local kubectl context. In fact, you don't need the local Kubernetes CLI at all. You can connect the stack component to the Service Connector instead:

$ zenml orchestrator register <ORCHESTRATOR_NAME> --flavor kubernetes
Running with active workspace: 'default' (repository)
Running with active stack: 'default' (repository)
Successfully registered orchestrator `<ORCHESTRATOR_NAME>`.

$ zenml service-connector list-resources --resource-type kubernetes-cluster -e
The following 'kubernetes-cluster' resources can be accessed by service connectors configured in your workspace:
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┯━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┯━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┯━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┯━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃             CONNECTOR ID             │ CONNECTOR NAME        │ CONNECTOR TYPE │ RESOURCE TYPE         │ RESOURCE NAMES      ┃
┠──────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────┼────────────────┼───────────────────────┼─────────────────────┨
┃ e33c9fac-5daa-48b2-87bb-0187d3782cde │ aws-iam-multi-eu      │ 🔶 aws         │ 🌀 kubernetes-cluster │ kubeflowmultitenant ┃
┃                                      │                       │                │                       │ zenbox              ┃
┠──────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────┼────────────────┼───────────────────────┼─────────────────────┨
┃ ed528d5a-d6cb-4fc4-bc52-c3d2d01643e5 │ aws-iam-multi-us      │ 🔶 aws         │ 🌀 kubernetes-cluster │ zenhacks-cluster    ┃
┠──────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────┼────────────────┼───────────────────────┼─────────────────────┨
┃ 1c54b32a-4889-4417-abbd-42d3ace3d03a │ gcp-sa-multi          │ 🔵 gcp         │ 🌀 kubernetes-cluster │ zenml-test-cluster  ┃
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┷━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┷━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┷━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┷━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛

$ zenml orchestrator connect <ORCHESTRATOR_NAME> --connector aws-iam-multi-us
Running with active workspace: 'default' (repository)
Running with active stack: 'default' (repository)
Successfully connected orchestrator `<ORCHESTRATOR_NAME>` to the following resources:
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┯━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┯━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┯━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┯━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃             CONNECTOR ID             │ CONNECTOR NAME   │ CONNECTOR TYPE │ RESOURCE TYPE         │ RESOURCE NAMES   ┃
┠──────────────────────────────────────┼──────────────────┼────────────────┼───────────────────────┼──────────────────┨
┃ ed528d5a-d6cb-4fc4-bc52-c3d2d01643e5 │ aws-iam-multi-us │ 🔶 aws         │ 🌀 kubernetes-cluster │ zenhacks-cluster ┃
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┷━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┷━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┷━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┷━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛

# Register and activate a stack with the new orchestrator
$ zenml stack register <STACK_NAME> -o <ORCHESTRATOR_NAME> ... --set

2. if you don't have a Service Connector on hand and you don't want to register one , the local Kubernetes kubectl client needs to be configured with a configuration context pointing to the remote cluster. The kubernetes_context stack component must also be configured with the value of that context:

zenml orchestrator register <ORCHESTRATOR_NAME> \
    --flavor=kubernetes \
    --kubernetes_context=<KUBERNETES_CONTEXT>

# Register and activate a stack with the new orchestrator
zenml stack register <STACK_NAME> -o <ORCHESTRATOR_NAME> ... --set

ZenML will build a Docker image called <CONTAINER_REGISTRY_URI>/zenml:<PIPELINE_NAME> which includes your code and use it to run your pipeline steps in Kubernetes. Check out this page if you want to learn more about how ZenML builds these images and how you can customize them.

You can now run any ZenML pipeline using the Kubernetes orchestrator:

python file_that_runs_a_zenml_pipeline.py

Additional configuration

For additional configuration of the Kubernetes orchestrator, you can pass KubernetesOrchestratorSettings which allows you to configure (among others) the following attributes:

• pod_settings: Node selectors, affinity, and tolerations to apply to the Kubernetes Pods running your pipeline. These can be either specified using the Kubernetes model objects or as dictionaries.

from zenml.integrations.kubernetes.flavors.kubernetes_orchestrator_flavor import KubernetesOrchestratorSettings
from kubernetes.client.models import V1Toleration

kubernetes_settings = KubernetesOrchestratorSettings(
    pod_settings={
        "affinity": {
            "nodeAffinity": {
                "requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution": {
                    "nodeSelectorTerms": [
                        {
                            "matchExpressions": [
                                {
                                    "key": "node.kubernetes.io/name",
                                    "operator": "In",
                                    "values": ["my_powerful_node_group"],
                                }
                            ]
                        }
                    ]
                }
            }
        },
        "tolerations": [
            V1Toleration(
                key="node.kubernetes.io/name",
                operator="Equal",
                value="",
                effect="NoSchedule"
            )
        ]
    }
)


@pipeline(
    settings={
        "orchestrator.kubernetes": kubernetes_settings
    }
)


...

Check out the API docs for a full list of available attributes and this docs page for more information on how to specify settings.

A concrete example of using the Kubernetes orchestrator can be found here.

For more information and a full list of configurable attributes of the Kubernetes orchestrator, check out the API Docs .

Enabling CUDA for GPU-backed hardware

Note that if you wish to use this orchestrator to run steps on a GPU, you will need to follow the instructions on this page to ensure that it works. It requires adding some extra settings customization and is essential to enable CUDA for the GPU to give its full acceleration.