During KubeCon EU 2024, CNCF launched its first Cloud-Native AI Whitepaper. This article provides an in-depth analysis of the content of this whitepaper.

In March 2024, during KubeCon EU, the Cloud-Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) released its first detailed whitepaper on Cloud-Native Artificial Intelligence (CNAI) ¹. This report extensively explores the current state, challenges, and future development directions of integrating cloud-native technologies with artificial intelligence. This article will delve into the core content of this whitepaper.

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What is Cloud-Native AI?

Cloud-Native AI refers to building and deploying artificial intelligence applications and workloads using cloud-native technology principles. This includes leveraging microservices, containerization, declarative APIs, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) among other cloud-native technologies to enhance AI applications’ scalability, reusability, and operability.

The following diagram illustrates the architecture of Cloud-Native AI, redrawn based on the whitepaper.

Relationship between Cloud-Native AI and Cloud-Native Technologies

Cloud-native technologies provide a flexible, scalable platform that makes the development and operation of AI applications more efficient. Through containerization and microservices architecture, developers can iterate and deploy AI models quickly while ensuring high availability and scalability of the system. Kuuch as resource scheduling, automatic scaling, and service discovery.

The whitepaper provides two examples to illustrate the relationship between Cloud-Native AI and cloud-native technologies, namely running AI on cloud-native infrastructure:

Hugging Face Collaborates with Microsoft to launch Hugging Face Model Catalog on Azure²
OpenAI Scaling Kubernetes to 7,500 nodes³

Challenges of Cloud-Native AI

Despite providing a solid foundation for AI applications, there are still challenges when integrating AI workloads with cloud-native platforms. These challenges include data preparation complexity, model training resource requirements, and maintaining model security and isolation in multi-tenant environments. Additionally, resource management and scheduling in cloud-native environments are crucial for large-scale AI applications and need further optimization to support efficient model training and inference.

Development Path of Cloud-Native AI

The whitepaper proposes several development paths for Cloud-Native AI, including improving resource scheduling algorithms to better support AI workloads, developing new service mesh technologies to enhance the performance and security of AI applications, and promoting innovation and standardization of Cloud-Native AI technology through open-source projects and community collaboration.

Cloud-Native AI Technology Landscape

Cloud-Native AI involves various technologies, ranging from containers and microservices to service mesh and serverless computing. Kubernetes plays a central role in deploying and managing AI applications, while service mesh technologies such as Istio and Envoy provide robust traffic management and security features. Additionally, monitoring tools like Prometheus and Grafana are crucial for maintaining the performance and reliability of AI applications.

Below is the Cloud-Native AI landscape diagram provided in the whitepaper.

Kubernetes
Volcano
Armada
Kuberay
Nvidia NeMo
Yunikorn
Kueue
Flame

Distributed Training

Kubeflow Training Operator
Pytorch DDP
TensorFlow Distributed
Open MPI
DeepSpeed
Megatron
Horovod
Apla
…

ML Serving

Kserve
Seldon
VLLM
TGT
Skypilot
…

CI/CD — Delivery

Kubeflow Pipelines
Mlflow
TFX
BentoML
MLRun
…

Data Science

Jupyter
Kubeflow Notebooks
PyTorch
TensorFlow
Apache Zeppelin

Workload Observability

Prometheus
Influxdb
Grafana
Weights and Biases (wandb)
OpenTelemetry
…

AutoML

Hyperopt
Optuna
Kubeflow Katib
NNI
…

Governance & Policy

Kyverno
Kyverno-JSON
OPA/Gatekeeper
StackRox Minder
…

Data Architecture

ClickHouse
Apache Pinot
Apache Druid
Cassandra
ScyllaDB
Hadoop HDFS
Apache HBase
Presto
Trino
Apache Spark
Apache Flink
Kafka
Pulsar
Fluid
Memcached
Redis
Alluxio
Apache Superset
…

Vector Databases

Chroma
Weaviate
Quadrant
Pinecone
Extensions
Redis
Postgres SQL
ElasticSearch
…

Model/LLM Observability

• Trulens
Langfuse
Deepchecks
OpenLLMetry
…

Conclusion

Finally, the following key points are summarized:

Role of Open Source Community : The whitepaper indicates the role of the open-source community in advancing Cloud-Native AI, including accelerating innovation and reducing costs through open-source projects and extensive collaboration.
Importance of Cloud-Native Technologies : Cloud-Native AI, built according to cloud-native principles, emphasizes the importance of repeatability and scalability. Cloud-native technologies provide an efficient development and operation environment for AI applications, especially in resource scheduling and service scalability.
Existing Challenges : Despite bringing many advantages, Cloud-Native AI still faces challenges in data preparation, model training resource requirements, and model security and isolation.
Future Development Directions : The whitepaper proposes development paths including optimizing resource scheduling algorithms to support AI workloads, developing new service mesh technologies to enhance performance and security, and promoting technology innovation and standardization through open-source projects and community collaboration.
Key Technological Components : Key technologies involved in Cloud-Native AI include containers, microservices, service mesh, and serverless computing, among others. Kubernetes plays a central role in deploying and managing AI applications, while service mesh technologies like Istio and Envoy provide necessary traffic management and security.

For more details, please download the Cloud-Native AI whitepaper ⁴.

A Deep Dive into CNCF’s Cloud-Native AI Whitepaper