Pipelines Standalone Deployment in GCP

As an alternative to deploying Kubeflow as a whole with many components including pipelines, you also have a choice to deploy only Kubeflow Pipelines. Follow the instructions below to deploy Kubeflow Pipelines standalone using the supplied kustomize manifests.

Knowledge about Kubernetes, kubectl and kustomize will help you understand this document better and be able to customize based on your needs.

Deploying Kubeflow Pipelines standalone to an existing cluster

1. Deploy latest version of Kubeflow Pipelines:

   export PIPELINE_VERSION=0.1.31
   kubectl apply -k github.com/kubeflow/pipelines//manifests/kustomize/env/dev?ref=$PIPELINE_VERSION
   

2. Get the URL for the Kubeflow Pipelines UI :

   kubectl describe configmap inverse-proxy-config -n kubeflow | grep googleusercontent.com
   

Deploying Kubeflow Pipelines standalone from scratch

1. Prepare a Kubernetes cluster:

   You can reference Creating a cluster for Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

   Recommend using the following gcloud command to create a cluster that can run all pipeline samples:

   # The following parameters can be customized based on your needs.
   
   CLUSTER_NAME="kubeflow-pipelines-standalone"
   ZONE="us-central1-a"
   MACHINE_TYPE="n1-standard-2" # A machine with 2 CPUs and 7.50GB memory
   SCOPES="storage-rw,cloud-platform" # These scopes are needed for running some pipeline samples
   
   gcloud container clusters create $CLUSTER_NAME \
       --zone $ZONE \
       --machine-type $MACHINE_TYPE \
       --scopes $SCOPES \
       --num-nodes 2 \
       --max-nodes 5 \
       --min-nodes 2 \
       --enable-autoscaling
   

   Reference:

   • You can find available zones in https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones/#available.
   • Get gcloud CLI tool at https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/.
   • Read gcloud container clusters create command documentation at https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/container/clusters/create.

2. Download kubectl CLI tool:

   You can get kubectl from its official doc.

   You need kubectl version 1.14 or later, for native support of kustomize (the kubectl apply -k option you will see below).

3. Configure kubectl to talk to your cluster:

   You can reference Configuring cluster access for kubectl.

4. Deploy latest version of Kubeflow Pipelines standalone to your cluster:

   export PIPELINE_VERSION=0.1.31
   kubectl apply -k github.com/kubeflow/pipelines//manifests/kustomize/env/dev?ref=$PIPELINE_VERSION
   

   Kubeflow Pipelines applications take a while (~3 minutes) to start.

5. Get public URL of Pipelines UI and use it to access Kubeflow Pipelines:

   kubectl describe configmap inverse-proxy-config -n kubeflow | grep googleusercontent.com
   

Customization

Customization can be done through kustomize overlays.

Note - The instruction below assume you installed kubectl v1.14.0 or later, which has native support of kustomize. To get latest kubectl, visit here

For the following instructions, first clone Kubeflow Pipelines repo, and use it as working directory.

Deploy on GCP with CloudSQL and Google Cloud Storage

This is recommended for production environments. See here for more details.

Change deployment namespace

To deploy Kubeflow Pipelines standalone in namespace FOO:

• Edit dev/kustomization.yaml or gcp/kustomization.yaml namespace section to FOO.

• Then run

  kubectl apply -k manifests/kustomize/env/dev
  # Or the following if using GCP Cloud SQL + Google Cloud Storage
  # kubectl apply -k manifests/kustomize/env/gcp
  

Disable the public endpoint

By default, the deployment installs an inverting proxy agent that exposes a public URL. If you want to skip installing it,

• Comment out the proxy component in the kustomization.yaml.

• Then run:

  kubectl apply -k manifests/kustomize/env/dev
  # Or the following if using GCP Cloud SQL + Google Cloud Storage
  # kubectl apply -k manifests/kustomize/env/gcp
  

The UI is still accessible by port-forwarding:

kubectl port-forward -n kubeflow svc/ml-pipeline-ui 8080:80

and open http://localhost:8080/.

Uninstall

You can uninstall Kubeflow Pipelines by running:

export PIPELINE_VERSION=0.1.31
kubectl delete -k github.com/kubeflow/pipelines//manifests/kustomize/env/dev?ref=$PIPELINE_VERSION

Or if you deployed through kustomize:

kubectl delete -k manifests/kustomize/env/dev
# Or the following if using GCP Cloud SQL + Google Cloud Storage
# kubectl delete -k manifests/kustomize/env/gcp

Troubleshooting

Permission error installing Kubeflow Pipelines standalone to a cluster

Run:

kubectl create clusterrolebinding your-binding --clusterrole=cluster-admin --user=[your-user-name]

Pipeline samples that require “user-gcp-sa” secret

If sample pipeline requires a “user-gcp-sa” secret, you could create one by:

• First download the GCE VM service account token Document:

  gcloud iam service-accounts keys create application_default_credentials.json \
    --iam-account [SA-NAME]@[PROJECT-ID].iam.gserviceaccount.com
  

• Run:

  kubectl create secret -n [your-namespace] generic user-gcp-sa \
    --from-file=user-gcp-sa.json=application_default_credentials.json
  

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