Scaling Replicas

Replica Settings

Replicas settings can be provided at several levels with the most specific taking precedence, from most general to most specific as shown below:

• .spec.replicas
• .spec.predictors[].replicas
• .spec.predictors[].componentSpecs[].replicas

If you use the annotation seldon.io/engine-separate-pod you can also set the number of replicas for the service orchestrator in:

• .spec.predictors[].svcOrchSpec.replicas

As illustration, a contrived example showing various options is shown below:

apiVersion: machinelearning.seldon.io/v1
kind: SeldonDeployment
metadata:
  name: test-replicas
spec:
  replicas: 1
  predictors:
  - componentSpecs:
    - spec:
        containers:
        - image: seldonio/mock_classifier_rest:1.3
          name: classifier
    - spec:
        containers:
        - image: seldonio/mock_classifier_rest:1.3
          name: classifier2
      replicas: 3
    graph:
      endpoint:
        type: REST
      name: classifier
      type: MODEL
      children:
      - name: classifier2
        type: MODEL
        endpoint:
          type: REST
    name: example
    replicas: 2
    traffic: 50
  - componentSpecs:
    - spec:
        containers:
        - image: seldonio/mock_classifier_rest:1.3
          name: classifier3
    graph:
      children: []
      endpoint:
        type: REST
      name: classifier3
      type: MODEL
    name: example2
    traffic: 50

• classfier will have a deployment with 2 replicas as specified by the predictor it is defined within
• classifier2 will have a deployment with 3 replicas as that is specified in its componentSpec
• classifier3 will have 1 replica as it takes its value from .spec.replicas

For more details see a worked example for the above replica settings.

Scale replicas

Its is possible to use the kubectl scale command to set the replicas value of the SeldonDeployment. For simple inference graphs this can be an easy way to scale them up and down. For example:

apiVersion: machinelearning.seldon.io/v1
kind: SeldonDeployment
metadata:
  name: seldon-scale
spec:
  replicas: 1
  predictors:
  - componentSpecs:
    - spec:
        containers:
        - image: seldonio/mock_classifier_rest:1.3
          name: classifier
    graph:
      children: []
      endpoint:
        type: REST
      name: classifier
      type: MODEL
    name: example

One can scale this Seldon Deployment up using the command:

kubectl scale --replicas=2 sdep/seldon-scale

For more details you can follow a worked example of scaling.

Autoscaling Seldon Deployments

To autoscale your Seldon Deployment resources you can add Horizontal Pod Template Specifications to the Pod Template Specifications you create. There are three steps:

1. Ensure you have a resource request for the metric you want to scale on if it is a standard metric such as cpu or memory.
2. Add a HPA Spec refering to this Deployment. (We presently support v1beta1 version of k8s HPA Metrics spec)

To illustrate this we have an example Seldon Deployment below:

apiVersion: machinelearning.seldon.io/v1
kind: SeldonDeployment
metadata:
  name: seldon-model
spec:
  name: test-deployment
  predictors:
  - componentSpecs:
    - hpaSpec:
        maxReplicas: 3
        metrics:
        - resource:
            name: cpu
            targetAverageUtilization: 70
          type: Resource
        minReplicas: 1
      spec:
        containers:
        - image: seldonio/mock_classifier_rest:1.3
          imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
          name: classifier
          resources:
            requests:
              cpu: '0.5'
        terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 1
    graph:
      children: []
      endpoint:
        type: REST
      name: classifier
      type: MODEL
    name: example

The key points here are:

• We define a CPU request for our container. This is required to allow us to utilize cpu autoscaling in Kubernetes.
• We define an HPA associated with our componentSpec which scales on CPU when the average CPU is above 70% up to a maximum of 3 replicas.

For a worked example see this notebook.