[cheptsov]

Oh, excited to see dstack featured here. Founder and core contributor to dstack here. Yes, we aim to simplify container orchestration for AI and build an alternative to both K8S and Slurm - for both multi-cloud and on-prem.

Would love to hear feedback!

[empath75]

Trying to understand what this gives me that kubeflow doesn't and I think it's just completely untrue that this does everything kubeflow does and more, as your documentation claims.

[cheptsov]

Well,

1. No changes in the code required; Works out of the box with any Docker image; Incl. support for distributed training

2. Out-of-the-box support for AMD/NVIDIA/TPU

3. Multi-cloud, incl. Neoclouds such as Lambda, RunPod, TensorDock, and more to come

4. 5 min to set up your own on-prem cluster

5. Easye to combine multi-cloud + on-prem

6. On top of task, you get dev environments and model inference

[doctorpangloss]

What are the differences in opinions between dstack and SkyPilot? Why should I try dstack first over SkyPilot? Same question could be posed to Modal.

Aren’t you worried about the amount of product development that goes into Kubernetes and its ecosystem? For example, is Keda poorly managed, or does flexible autoscaling require full time attention from a developer? What about democratic-csi? NVIDIA GPU Operator, AMD’s k8s device plugins, Intel’s? Calico versus Cilium?

[cheptsov]

Thank you for the question!

> What are the differences in opinions between dstack and SkyPilot?

SkyPilot is great. I think there are many tiny details though. At dstack, we try to provide out-of-the-box and more high-level experience.

Examples:

1. Authorization built-into services

2. Dev environments with IDE integration

3. HTTPS out of the box with an ability to set up own domains

4. Projects for team management and resource isolation

5. Hardware metrics tracking

Also, we try to distance from Kubernetes and improve our own orchestrator that natively integrates with cloud providers

> Same question could be posed to Modal.

Modal is great too. Modal's strengths is Python decorators and their focus on cloldstarts/serverless kind of experience.

dstack here is more about flexibility/multi-cloud/on-prem/etc. For example, I personally prefer being able to run any code with dstack without changing my code. Otehr people may prefer Python decorators.

> Aren’t you worried about the amount of product development that goes into Kubernetes and its ecosystem?

A very good question. I think its both a strength and a weakness of Kubernetes. So far we see that for us it's a lot easier to bring AI-native experience, simplify it, and make it more out of the box.

We of course respect K8S though. But we think the community to deserve options!

> What about democratic-csi?

Haven't seen it yet. Will look into it. At dstack, we support volumes for both cloud and on-prem.

> NVIDIA GPU Operator, AMD’s k8s device plugins

We aim to support any accelerators out of the box.

> Calico versus Cilium?

Haven't heard of it yet.

P.S.: Whould love to hear your opinion too!