What's the easiest way to move from ACI to AKS deployment?

Question

After having solved Why does my ML model deployment in Azure Container Instance still fail? and having deployed on ACI, I am using Azure Machine Learning Service to deploy a ML model as web service on AKS.

My current (working) ACI-deployment code is

from azureml.core.webservice import Webservice, AciWebservice
from azureml.core.image import ContainerImage

aciconfig = AciWebservice.deploy_configuration(cpu_cores=1, 
                      memory_gb=8, 
                      tags={"data": "text",  "method" : "NB"}, 
                      description='Predict something')


image_config = ContainerImage.image_configuration(execution_script="score.py", 
                      docker_file="Dockerfile",
                      runtime="python", 
                      conda_file="myenv.yml")

image = ContainerImage.create(name = "scorer-image",
                      models = [model],
                      image_config = image_config,
                      workspace = ws
                      )

service_name = 'scorer-svc'
service = Webservice.deploy_from_image(deployment_config = aciconfig,
                                        image = image,
                                        name = service_name,
                                        workspace = ws)

I would like to modify it so to deploy on AKS, but looks more convoluted than I expected, as I imagined moving from ACI to AKS (i.e. from test to production) to be a routine operation. Still, it seems to need a bit more of changes in the code than I thought:

• AKS seems to require an InferenceConfig object (?)
• with AKS there's no method like deploy_from_image for deployment from my existing Docker image (?)

Can deployment be done on AKS by performing minimal changes to the ACI code instead?

Answer 1

From the code that you have provided, when you deploy the application in the ACI using the method Webservice.deploy_from_image with the parameters deployment_config and container image. The deployment_config makes by the AciWebservice.deploy_configuration.

When you take a look at the ML about AKS, you can also find the method AksWebservice.deploy_configuration. So you just need to change the method AciWebservice.deploy_configuration into AksWebservice.deploy_configuration, then the application can be deployed from ACI into AKS. And it's the minimal changes. Also, it can deploy from the docker image.