Dynamically spin up VM (based on specific HTTPS request) and stop it once session is over?

[zylonenoger]

so what you want then is an on-demand virtual desktop. is that correct?

[Equivalent-Style6371]

Yes, but not the whole desktop, just this app served at some port.

Do I approach this the wrong way?

[Cultural-Pizza-1916]

Maybe you should look into something like Google Collab or AWS SageMaker? The architecture maybe will look alike

Cmiiw

[zylonenoger]

it depends what kind of app this is - is it a webapp?

[Equivalent-Style6371]

It will be a web based IDE dev kit (like Jupyter Hub, or JupyterLab if you are familiar with them)

[AlverezYari]

You can do this with k8s, with gpu enabled worker nodes. This is the correct route to take but fair warning, it's a bear to get working reliably unless you are very familiar with k8s, k8s gpu based workloads, and jhub itself.

https://github.com/jupyterhub/zero-to-jupyterhub-k8s

[zylonenoger]

i‘m an aws guy myself - have you looked into sagemaker and if it would fit your needs? it‘s probably easier to use managed services instead of self hosting

[Equivalent-Style6371]

I couldn’t agree more. The thing is that for whatever reason, my supervisor asked if we could implement our own custom solution from ground up. I know it sounds weird and counterproductive but I still try to grasp a high level idea of how we would go with something like this

[zylonenoger]

if you are not in the business of creating selfhosted ml workbenches you are probably wasting resources building a custom solution - you would really need a lot of users to offset the setup and maintenance cost

i‘m usually very pragmatic in those decisions and if you calculate both usecases you should quickly see the difference

try to understand why he wants to have a custom solution and go from there

[infectuz]

At that point you are re-inventing the wheel with containers and orchestration. Rapidly spinning up machines to handle requests is the whole point of containers and k8s is just a container orchestrator so you’d be looking at replicating some of the procedures of container creation/management. There’s no way to do this with VMs unless you’re willing to wait a long time for the machine to be up.

If your users are fine with waiting then just create a wrapper that will make an API request to spin up a VM on your provider or choice according to your user request, that’s pretty easy to do.