Conference:  KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

Authors: Adnan Hodzic

2023-04-19

This talk covers ING’s MLP (Machine Learning Platform) 2+ year migration journey to Kubernetes. ING being the biggest bank in the Netherlands and one of the biggest world banks entails we work in a highly regulated environment and are subjected to rigorous policies in terms of control with IT process lifecycle. Being a data scientist in one such environment, who would like to deploy pre-trained machine learning models to Production, without much or any underlying SRE/deployment knowledge complicates things. That’s where MLP (Machine Learning Platform) steps in, as it takes care of all the above mentioned problems by serving as a model hosting platform. As an SRE Adnan will cover problems and limitations of the existing platform setup in the VM (Virtual Machine) world and the inception of an idea to migrate to Kubernetes. Which steps it took to start the realization of one such idea and its migration plan. Followed by resistance, inability to choose the ideal target destination, platform’s growth and challenge in supporting the current setup in its growing capacity and ultimately leading to scalability issues. All these factors lead to a perfect storm, which led to the inevitable. Migration to Kubernetes and how that process came to be.