KEP 831-Kubeflow-Helm-Support: Support Helm as an Alternative for Kustomize

[chasecadet]

Proposal: Introduce Helm Chart for Basic Kubeflow Installation
Summary

This PR proposes introducing a Helm chart for deploying a basic Kubeflow installation. Given the increased demand and the KSC's stance in issue #821 on maintaining neutral deployment language and user-defined production readiness, supporting Helm will improve adoption and simplify deployments while preserving the flexibility of community-maintained manifests.
Background

There have been ongoing community efforts around Helm support, including discussions in the Kubeflow-Helm-Chart Slack channel. Formalizing this effort will provide users with an officially supported Helm chart that aligns with Kubeflow's deployment principles.

Next Steps

* Gather community feedback on the proposal.
* Discuss best practices for Helm chart structure and maintenance.

[google-oss-prow]

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[chasecadet]

@juliusvonkohout @andreyvelich @varodrig

[andreyvelich]

Thank you for this great effort @chasecadet and team!
I will take a look next week.
@chasecadet @akgraner Please can you also inform about this KEP in Kubeflow Discuss?

/hold for community to review.
cc @kubeflow/wg-training-leads @kubeflow/wg-automl-leads @kubeflow/wg-manifests-leads @kubeflow/wg-data-leads @kubeflow/release-team @kubeflow/wg-pipeline-leads @kubeflow/wg-notebooks-leads @kubeflow/wg-deployment-leads @kubeflow/kubeflow-steering-committee

[juliusvonkohout]

@chasecadet you need to sign your commits.

[chasecadet]

@chasecadet you need to sign your commits.
Do I need to rebase then?

[thesuperzapper]

Foundationally, this is still a discussion around if we have an "official" distribution or not.

This KEP proposes a single "mega" helm chart with all components inside, this is by definition, an opinionated "distribution" of Kubeflow Platform.

The community has discussed and rejected having official distributions in the past, for reasons that are still applicable:

1. The fundamental goal of the project is to make AI/ML tools for Kubernetes (Pipelines, Notebooks, Trainer, Feature Store, etc.)
2. Our strength is that our tools can run on any Kubernetes cluster, with no preference for any deployment method, cloud vendor, or anything else.
3. If we make opinionated deployment decisions, less people will be able to adopt our tools, or include them in downstream platforms.
4. There is strong evidence that it's not possible to create a successful "generic" distribution. See the fact that multiple successful distributions exist today, each with different opinionated approaches.
5. Those in the OWNERS file of an official distribution would have the ability to make decisions that affect the whole community. This likely means that 1-3 consulting/cloud/platform companies make decisions that benefit them, rather than the goal of making our tools the standard.

PS: I want to stress that your motivations about making Kubeflow easier to use are great, and I am sure some users would love a Kubeflow Distribution that looks like this. (In fact, there are at least 2 that I am aware of which are similar to your proposal already, so perhaps you can collaborate with them). However, it's critical to keep the project neutral and focused on the tools themselves.

---

Also, while it's clearly not the intention of this KEP, there is a separate discussion around if automatically-generated helm charts based on the existing component kustomize manifests would be useful for downstream distributions. But that would be a completely separate proposal.

[varodrig]

@chasecadet you need to sign your commits.
Do I need to rebase then?

Yes, here's the details and instructions you should folllow
https://github.com/kubeflow/community/runs/38211766217

[vikas-saxena02]

I think its a great initiative and I have already let @juliusvonkohout know that I am willing to contribute to it.

[chasecadet]

DCO is still struggling.

[chasecadet]

this is by definition, an opinionated "distribution" of Kubeflow Platform.

@thesuperzapper I want to make sure I fully understand your perspective, especially since you have a distribution. My goal is not to discourage contributions or distributions, so I have a few clarifying questions:

• Does Kubeflow have a definition of an official distribution?
• What criteria would prevent this from being perceived as an official distribution?
• Can you provide examples of official distributions?
• What are your concerns regarding official distributions?
• How do projects with official distributions manage other distributions?
• What impact, if any, do official distributions have on other distributions?
• Do we need to clarify we are deploying only core components without opinionated changes?
• How do we define opinionated changes v.s. a templating engine/tool?
• Is our vanilla manifests + Kustomize considered a distribution?

Looking forward to your insights!

[juliusvonkohout]

• Does Kubeflow have a definition of an official distribution?

• What criteria would prevent this from being perceived as an official distribution?

• Can you provide examples of official distributions?

• What are your concerns regarding official distributions?

• How do projects with official distributions manage other distributions?

• What impact, if any, do official distributions have on other distributions?

• Do we need to clarify we are deploying only core components without opinionated changes?

• How do we define opinionated changes v.s. a templating engine/tool?

• Is our vanilla manifests + Kustomize considered a distribution?

• Does Kubeflow have a definition of an official distribution? Something that is derived from kubeflow/manifests. It can be one person in private or a large company in public or mixtures of that.
• Is our kubeflow/manifests considered a distribution? No

[juliusvonkohout]

DCO is still struggling.

this is what i see in the tests

So one from me is also missing.

[vikas-saxena02]

DCO is still struggling.

Mate!! You need to sign-off your commits

[juliusvonkohout]

#831 as placeholder.

[juliusvonkohout]

@chasecadet i think the branch is malformed, since it was not a rebase, but something else. It should change 1 file, not 39.

I have created #832 to continue. Please either close this PR with /close and continue in #832 or fix the branch, because otherwise we cannot merge it.

[juliusvonkohout]

I got confirmation on slack from @chasecadet to continue in #832
/close

[google-oss-prow]

@juliusvonkohout: Closed this PR.

In response to this:

I got confirmation on slack from @chasecadet to continue in #832
/close

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