Install Locally¶

This guide runs through how to set up and install Seldon Core in a Kubernetes cluster running on your local machine. By the end, you’ll have Seldon Core up and running and be ready to start deploying machine learning models.

Prerequisites¶

In order to install Seldon Core locally you’ll need the following tools:

Warning

Depending on permissions for your local machine and the directory you’re working in, some tools might require root access

Docker or Podman¶

Docker and Podman are container engines. Kind needs a container engine (like docker or podman) to actually run the containers inside your clusters. You only need one of either Docker or Podman. Note that Docker is no longer free for individual use at large companies:

or

Note

If using Podman remember to set alias docker=podman

Kind¶

Kind is a tool for running Kubernetes clusters locally. We’ll use it to create a cluster on your machine so that you can install Seldon Core in to it. If don’t already have kind installed on your machine, you’ll need to follow their installation guide:

Kubectl¶

kubectl is the Kubernetes command-line tool. It allows you to run commands against Kubernetes clusters, which we’ll need to do as part of setting up Seldon Core.

Helm¶

Helm is a package manager that makes it easy to find, share and use software built for Kubernetes. If you don’t already have Helm installed locally, you can install it here:

Set Up Kind¶

Once kind is installed on your system you can create a new Kubernetes cluster by running

kind create cluster --name seldon

cat <<EOF | kind create cluster --name seldon --config=-
kind: Cluster
apiVersion: kind.x-k8s.io/v1alpha4
nodes:
- role: control-plane
kubeadmConfigPatches:
- |
    kind: InitConfiguration
    nodeRegistration:
    kubeletExtraArgs:
        node-labels: "ingress-ready=true"
extraPortMappings:
- containerPort: 80
    hostPort: 80
    protocol: TCP
- containerPort: 443
    hostPort: 443
    protocol: TCP
EOF

After kind has created your cluster, you can configure kubectl to use the cluster by setting the context:

kubectl cluster-info --context kind-seldon

From now on, all commands run using kubectl will be directed at your kind cluster.

Note

Kind prefixes your cluster names with kind- so your cluster context is kind-seldon and not just seldon

Install Cluster Ingress¶

Ingress is a Kubernetes object that provides routing rules for your cluster. It manages the incomming traffic and routes it to the services running inside the cluster.

Seldon Core supports using either Istio or Ambassador to manage incomming traffic. Seldon Core automatically creates the objects and rules required to route traffic to your deployed machine learning models.

Istio is an open source service mesh. If the term service mesh is unfamiliar to you, it’s worth reading a little more about Istio.

Download Istio

For Linux and macOS, the easiest way to download Istio is using the following command:

curl -L https://istio.io/downloadIstio | sh -

Move to the Istio package directory. For example, if the package is istio-1.11.4:

cd istio-1.11.4

Add the istioctl client to your path (Linux or macOS):

export PATH=$PWD/bin:$PATH

Install Istio

Istio provides a command line tool istioctl to make the installation process easy. The demo configuration profile has a good set of defaults that will work on your local cluster.

istioctl install --set profile=demo -y

The namespace label istio-injection=enabled instructs Istio to automatically inject proxies alongside anything we deploy in that namespace. We’ll set it up for our default namespace:

kubectl label namespace default istio-injection=enabled

Create Istio Gateway

In order for Seldon Core to use Istio’s features to manage cluster traffic, we need to create an Istio Gateway by running the following command:

Warning

You will need to copy the entire command from the code block below

kubectl apply -f - << END
apiVersion: networking.istio.io/v1alpha3
kind: Gateway
metadata:
name: seldon-gateway
namespace: istio-system
spec:
selector:
    istio: ingressgateway # use istio default controller
servers:
- port:
    number: 80
    name: http
    protocol: HTTP
    hosts:
    - "*"
END

For custom configuration and more details on installing seldon core with Istio please see the Istio Ingress page.

Ambassador is a Kubernetes ingress controller and API gateway. It routes incomming traffic to the underlying kubernetes workloads through configuration. Install Ambassador following their docs.

Install Seldon Core¶

Before we install Seldon Core, we’ll create a new namespace seldon-system for the operator to run in:

kubectl create namespace seldon-system

We’re now ready to install Seldon Core in our cluster. Run the following command for your choice of Ingress:

helm install seldon-core seldon-core-operator \
    --repo https://storage.googleapis.com/seldon-charts \
    --set usageMetrics.enabled=true \
    --set istio.enabled=true \
    --namespace seldon-system

helm install seldon-core seldon-core-operator \
    --repo https://storage.googleapis.com/seldon-charts \
    --set usageMetrics.enabled=true \
    --set ambassador.enabled=true \
    --namespace seldon-system

You can check that your Seldon Controller is running by doing:

kubectl get pods -n seldon-system

You should see a seldon-controller-manager pod with STATUS=Running.

Local Port Forwarding¶

Because your kubernetes cluster is running locally, we need to forward a port on your local machine to one in the cluster for us to be able to access it externally. You can do this by running:

kubectl port-forward -n istio-system svc/istio-ingressgateway 8080:80

kubectl port-forward -n ambassador svc/ambassador 8080:80

This will forward any traffic from port 8080 on your local machine to port 80 inside your cluster.

You have now successfully installed Seldon Core on a local cluster and are ready to start deploying models as production microservices.