UPDATED 09:00 EDT / JULY 17 2018

INFRA

BlueData launches open-source initiative to optimize Kubernetes for AI and analytics

Data processing provider BlueData Inc. today launched BlueK8s, an open-source initiative aimed at making Kubernetes work better with artificial intelligence and analytics workloads.

Kubernetes is the leading framework for managing applications built with software containers. The project has grown in significance with the rising adoption of containers among enterprises, which use the technology to deploy services because it enables code to run across different kinds of infrastructure.

BlueData’s goal with Blue8Ks is to ease the task of bringing these benefits to AI and analytics use cases. According to the company, the initiative will include multiple projects intended to advance this mission. The inaugural project is KubeDirector, a piece of software created to simplify application deployment.

Packaging popular analytics and AI tools such as TensorFlow into containers is tricky because they weren’t created with the technology in mind. The setup process consequently tends to involve a great deal of manual work. Further exacerbating the challenge is the fact that large-scale data processing environments most often consist of multiple applications, each of which has to be deployed separately.

BlueData claims that KubeDirector does away with much of heavy living. According to the company, the software removes the need to decompose the components of an existing application into containers. It also saves enterprises the hassle of creating a custom runtime to manage the workload’s behavior after deployment.

“The expected state of a cluster is submitted as a request to the API server and stored in the Kubernetes etcd database. KubeDirector will apply the necessary application-specific workflows to transform the current state of the cluster into the expected state of the cluster,” BlueData co-founder and Chief Architect Tom Phelan wrote in a blog post.

According to Phelan, KubeDirector presents a “minimal” learning curve for developers already familiar with Kubernetes. The software will support a long list of open-source applications, including TensorFlow, Hadoop and Spark, to name a few.

Phelan wrote that the BlueK8s initiative draws on the insights that BlueData has gained from working with companies to implement data processing workloads. The Santa Clara, California-based company sells a software platform that enables users to deploy AI and analytics environments quickly using containers. BlueData recently started prototyping a version of the offering that uses Kubernetes under the hood.

The company is one of several industry players working to optimize the framework for stateful applications, or services that retain data between sessions. In parallel, the open-source community that maintains Kubernetes has been pursuing an effort to give the framework native capabilities for supporting such workloads.

Image: Cloud Native Computing Foundation

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