External access to Containers

Introduction¶

Researchers working with containers. many times need to remotely access the container. Some examples:

Using a Jupyter notebook that runs within the container
Using PyCharm to run python commands remotely.
Using TensorBoard to view machine learning visualizations

This requires exposing container ports. When using docker, the way Researchers expose ports is by declaring them when starting the container. Run:ai has similar syntax.

Run:ai is based on Kubernetes. Kubernetes offers an abstraction of the container's location. This complicates the exposure of ports. Kubernetes offers several options:

Method	Description	Prerequisites
Port Forwarding	Simple port forwarding allows access to the container via local and/or remote port.	None
NodePort	Exposes the service on each Node’s IP at a static port (the NodePort). You’ll be able to contact the NodePort service from outside the cluster by requesting `<NODE-IP>:<NODE-PORT>` regardless of which node the container actually resides in.	None
LoadBalancer	Exposes the service externally using a cloud provider’s load balancer.	Only available with cloud providers
Ingress	Allows access to Kubernetes services from outside the Kubernetes cluster. You configure access by creating a collection of rules that define which inbound connections reach which services.	Requires an Ingress controller to be installed. See below

See https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/service for further details on these four options.

Ingress¶

Ingress allows access to Kubernetes services from outside the Kubernetes cluster. You configure access by creating a collection of rules that define which inbound connections reach which services. More information about ingress can be found here.

Setup¶

To submit jobs via ingress, You must install an Ingress controller in your Kubernetes cluster. The prevalent Ingress controller is ingress-nginx.

Usage¶

The Researcher uses the Run:ai CLI to set the method type and the ports when submitting the Workload. Example:

runai config project team-a
runai submit test-ingress -i jupyter/base-notebook -g 1  --interactive \ 
   --service-type=ingress --port 8888:8888  \
   -- start-notebook.sh --NotebookApp.base_url=team-a-test-ingress

Then run:

runai list jobs

You will see the service URL with which to access the Jupyter notebook

The URL will be composed of the ingress end-point, the Project name and the Job name (e.g. https://10.255.174.13/team-a-test-ingress.

Alternatively, run:

kubectl get ingress -n runai-team-a test-ingress -o yaml

And find the IP, port, and full path from there.

External access to Containers

Introduction¶

Ingress¶

Setup¶

Usage¶

See Also¶