Lightning Talk: Introducing Kubeflow Metal: Your Machine Learning Platform on Baremetal Kubernetes

Kubeflow Metal is a new way of deploying Kubeflow onto a Kubernetes cluster on bare metal servers, providing a low friction, high velocity way to deploy an ML platform in an easy, experimental on-prem environment.

• Kubeflow Metal is a terraform module that deploys Kubeflow on a Kubernetes cluster on bare metal servers
• It is a cheaper alternative to cloud infrastructure with a fixed cost
• It allows for quick bootstrapping of an ML environment or infrastructure for a team
• Deployment is elastic and easily scalable
• It can be used for plugging into a CI/CD process
• It is useful for cases where data cannot be moved to the cloud, such as financial or insurance data
• Kubeflow Metal is looking for people to help improve the project

Kubeflow Metal is a new way to deploy Kubeflow on bare metal servers, providing a low friction, high velocity way to deploy an ML platform in an easy, experimental on-prem environment. It allows for quick bootstrapping of an ML environment or infrastructure for a team, and deployment is elastic and easily scalable. It is useful for cases where data cannot be moved to the cloud, such as financial or insurance data. Kubeflow Metal is looking for people to help improve the project, and is currently working on integrating with CI/CD processes.

It is daunting to look at deploying AI/ML solutions in an on-prem environment, and there are few detailed guides on how to do so. You can easily go to a cloud provider and use their tooling, but sometimes you have reasons to not want to do so. Maybe you may just have 3 machines in your lab and no budget for the cloud. Maybe you may want control over your data instead of uploading into a place you may not trust, so instead you wish to deploy to your on-prem environment. In this lightning talk, we will walk you through how to use the kubeflow-metal project, an Infrastructure as Code (IAC) approach to deploy the popular AI/ML Kubeflow platform on an Equinix Metal Kubernetes Cluster. Equinix Metal is an elastic baremetal platform, perfect for deploying production applications or simulating your own on-prem environment. This will give you a low friction, high velocity way to deploy an ML platform in an easy, experimental on-prem environment.