Cloudera AI Architecture
Once a Cloudera AI Workbench is provisioned, you can start using Cloudera AI for your end-to-end Machine Learning workflow.
Cloudera AI is a three-tier application that consists of a presentation tier, an application tier and a data tier.
Web tier
Cloudera AI is a web application that provides a UI that simplifies the action of managing workloads and resources for data scientists. It offers users a convenient way to deploy and scale their analytical pipeline and collaborate with their colleagues in a secure compartmentalized environment.
Cloudera AI communicates using HTTPS, Websocket, and gRPC. External communication is limited to HTTP and Websocket for the web UI and APIs. In-cluster service-to-service communication uses gRPC and is encrypted and mutually authenticated using TLS (Transport Layer Security).
Application tier
The application tier uses an actual set of workloads that users are running. These workloads are isolated in Kubernetes namespaces and run on specially marked compute nodes. Kubernetes/node level auto scaling is used to expand/contract the cluster size based on user demand.
User code gets baked into Docker images via a set of Source-to-Image pods (S2I), which includes a managing server, a queue for builds, a registry that serves the images for Docker, a git server, and the builders that actually perform the image building. Traditionally these images used the host machine's docker, but Cloudera AI switched to in-container builds for security and compliance on some platforms.
Data tier
Cloudera AI uses an internal Postgres database for persisting metadata of user workloads such as Sessions, Jobs, Models and Applications, which runs as a pod and is backed by a persistent volume, using the cloud-provider's block storage offering (for example, EBS for AWS and Premium_LRS for Azure).
Cloudera AI uses an NFS server, i.e. a POSIX-compliant file system, for storing users’ project files, which include user code, libraries installed into a Session, and small data files. For AWS, Cloudera AI creates an Elastic File System (EFS) file system when provisioning the workbench for storing project files. For Azure, users can either provide an NFS volume created in Azure NetApp Files or an external NFS server when provisioning Cloudera AI Workbench for storing project files. This NFS server is supplied to the Cloudera AI Workbenches as Kubernetes Persistent Volumes (PVs). Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs) are set up per-namespace, and each user gets their own namespace - thus each user’s view of the NFS server is limited to that exposed by the Cloudera on premises.
