In this chapter, we discuss the “serverful” approach to model deployment: we serve the clothing classification model with TensorFlow Serving on Kubernetes. Also, we talk about Kubeflow, an extension for Kubernetes that makes model deployment easier.
We’re going to cover a lot of material in this chapter, but Kubernetes is so complex that it’s simply not possible to go deep into detail. Because of that, we often refer to external resources for a more in-depth coverage of some topics. But don’t worry; you will learn enough to feel comfortable deploying your own models with it.
Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform. It sounds complex, but it’s nothing other than a place where we can deploy Docker containers. It takes care of exposing these containers as web services and scales these services up and down as the amount of requests we receive changes.