As part of the flurry of announcements coming this week out of AWS re:Invent, Amazon announced the release of Amazon SageMaker Operators for Kubernetes, a way for data scientists and developers to simplify training, tuning and deploying containerized machine learning models. Packaging machine learning models in containers can help put them to work inside organizations faster, but getting there often requires a lot of extra management to make it all work. Amazon SageMaker Operators for Kubernetes is supposed to make it easier to run and manage those containers, the underlying infrastructure needed to run the models, and the workflows associated with all of it. "While Kubernetes gives customers control and portability, running ML workloads on a Kubernetes cluster brings unique challenges. For example, the underlying infrastructure requires additional management such as optimizing for utilization, cost and performance; complying with appropriate security and regulatory requirements; and ensuring high availability and reliability," AWS' Aditya Bindal wrote in a blog post introducing the new feature.

AWS is excited to introduce Amazon SageMaker Operators for Kubernetes, a new capability that makes it easier for developers and data scientists using Kubernetes to train, tune, and deploy machine learning (ML) models in Amazon SageMaker. Customers can install these Amazon SageMaker Operators on their Kubernetes cluster to create Amazon SageMaker jobs natively using the Kubernetes API and command-line Kubernetes tools such as'kubectl'. Many AWS customers use Kubernetes, an open-source general-purpose container orchestration system, to deploy and manage containerized applications, often via a managed service such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). This enables data scientists and developers, for example, to set up repeatable ML pipelines and maintain greater control over their training and inference workloads. However, to support ML workloads these customers still need to write custom code to optimize the underlying ML infrastructure, ensure high availability and reliability, provide data science productivity tools, and comply with appropriate security and regulatory requirements.