ML is rapidly becoming essential to many businesses and organizations around the world. Therefore, IT and DevOps teams are now facing the challenge of standardizing ML workloads and provisioning cloud, on-premises, and hybrid compute resources that support the dynamic and intensive workflows that ML jobs and pipelines require.

Containers are isolated user-space instances that run on top of a shared host operating system kernel. The adoption of containers is rapidly increasing. Containers offer many of the same application sandboxing benefits that virtual machines (VMs) offer. However, because the hypervisor and guest operating system layers that VMs rely on have been eliminated, containers are far more lightweight.

Containers also allow the efficient packaging of application dependencies, run times, and so on directly with an application. The most commonly used container packaging format is the Docker container. An application that has been containerized in the Docker container format can be executed on any machine that can run Docker containers. This is true even if the application’s dependencies are not present on the machine, because all dependencies are packaged in the container itself. For more information, visit the Docker website.

Kubernetes, the popular container orchestrator, allows data scientists to launch flexible, container-based jobs and pipelines. It also enables infrastructure teams to manage and monitor ML workloads in a single managed and cloud-native environment. For more information, visit the Kubernetes website.

cnvrg.io is an AI operating system that transforms the way enterprises manage, scale, and accelerate AI and data science development from research to production. The code-first platform is built by data scientists for data scientists and offers flexibility to run on-premises or in the cloud. With model management, MLOps, and continual ML solutions, cnvrg.io brings top- of- the- line technology to data science teams so they can spend less time on DevOps and focus on the real magic—algorithms. Since using cnvrg.io, teams across industries have gotten more models to production resulting in increased business value.

ONTAP AI is a data center reference architecture for ML and deep learning (DL) workloads that uses NetApp AFF storage systems and NVIDIA DGX systems with Tesla V100 GPUs. ONTAP AI is based on the industry-standard NFS file protocol over 100Gb Ethernet, providing customers with a high-performance ML/DL infrastructure that uses standard data center technologies to reduce implementation and administration overhead. Using standardized network and protocols enables ONTAP AI to integrate into hybrid cloud environments while maintaining operational consistency and simplicity. As a prevalidated infrastructure solution, ONTAP AI reduces deployment time and risk and reduces administration overhead significantly, allowing customers to realize faster time to value.

DeepOps is an open source project from NVIDIA that, by using Ansible, automates the deployment of GPU server clusters according to best practices. DeepOps is modular and can be used for various deployment tasks. For this document and the validation exercise that it describes, DeepOps is used to deploy a Kubernetes cluster that consists of GPU server worker nodes. For more information, visit the DeepOps website.

Trident is an open source storage orchestrator developed and maintained by NetApp that greatly simplifies the creation, management, and consumption of persistent storage for Kubernetes workloads. Trident itself a Kubernetes-native application—it runs directly within a Kubernetes cluster. With Trident, Kubernetes users (developers, data scientists, Kubernetes administrators, and so on) can create, manage, and interact with persistent storage volumes in the standard Kubernetes format that they are already familiar with. At the same time, they can take advantage of NetApp advanced data management capabilities and a data fabric that is powered by NetApp technology. Trident abstracts away the complexities of persistent storage and makes it simple to consume. For more information, visit the Trident website.

NetApp StorageGRID is a software-defined object storage platform designed to meet these needs by providing simple, cloud-like storage that users can access using the S3 protocol. StorageGRID is a scale-out system designed to support multiple nodes across internet-connected sites, regardless of distance. With the intelligent policy engine of StorageGRID, users can choose erasure-coding objects across sites for geo-resiliency or object replication between remote sites to minimize WAN access latency. StorageGrid provides an excellent private-cloud primary object storage data lake in this solution.

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP data management software delivers control, protection, and efficiency to user data with the flexibility of public cloud providers including AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. Cloud Volumes ONTAP is cloud-native data management software built on the NetApp ONTAP storage software, providing users with a superior universal storage platform that addresses their cloud data needs. Having the same storage software in the cloud and on- premises provides users with the value of a data fabric without having to train IT staff in all-new methods to manage data.

For customers that are interested in hybrid cloud deployment models, Cloud Volumes ONTAP can provide the same capabilities and class-leading performance in most public clouds to provide a consistent and seamless user experience in any environment.