Introduction to Anyscale clouds
This page provides an overview of Anyscale clouds, including options for cloud deployments.
What is an Anyscale cloud?
An Anyscale cloud abstracts the resources and infrastructure necessary for managing Anyscale clusters. An Anyscale cloud is an isolated deployment of Anyscale on top of cloud resources or Kubernetes. When you deploy an Anyscale cloud, you create a trust relationship between the Anyscale control plane and resources in your cloud provider account or Kubernetes deployment.
Anyscale clouds sit between your Anyscale organization and projects in the platform hierarchy. Your organization can contain one or many Anyscale clouds. Organization admins and cloud owners can manage which users can access an Anyscale cloud. See Anyscale organization overview and Cloud roles.
An Anyscale cloud performs the following functions:
- Maintains information on where and how to start clusters.
- Deploys clusters in your AWS, Google Cloud, or Kubernetes environments.
- Defines the collection of resources necessary to manage Anyscale clusters.
- Provides isolated environments of resources for users within your organization.
When you sign up, Anyscale provisions a serverless Anyscale cloud (also called an Anyscale-hosted cloud) for you to start running workloads. Anyscale recommends serverless clouds mostly for product trials and platform evaluation, as most users require access to additional customizations or features only present in self-hosted clouds.
Types of cloud deployments
You configure an Anyscale cloud to deploy Ray clusters using either virtual machines or Kubernetes. The following table shows the options for each deployment:
| Backing compute infrastructure | Deployment options |
|---|---|
| Virtual machines | • AWS • Google Cloud • Serverless Anyscale clouds (Anyscale-hosted clouds) |
| Kubernetes | • Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) • Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) • Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) • Any Kubernetes cluster with configured network access, including on-prem |
Anyscale supports the following options for deploying new clouds:
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Anyscale-managed cloud deployment | Use anyscale cloud setup to let Anyscale configure resources and permissions in your AWS or Google Cloud account. Only available for clouds that deploy resources to virtual machines. |
| Customer-defined resource deployment | Use anyscale cloud register to create a trust relationship between Anyscale and resources you've configured in your cloud environment or Kubernetes cluster. Available for AWS and Google Cloud deployments, and required to deploy Anyscale on Kubernetes. |
How you should configure your Anyscale cloud?
You should choose the deployment type that meets the needs of your organization. The following table describes the different deployment types in order of increasing complexity:
| Deployment type | Details |
|---|---|
| Serverless Anyscale (Anyscale-hosted) cloud deployment | Default deployment for new organizations. Provides a fully managed cloud experience. Good for initial product exploration and for customers who prefer not to manage any cloud configurations. |
| Anyscale-managed cloud deployment | A simpler way to get Anyscale deployed in your AWS or Google Cloud account. Use this deployment method to get access to resources in your cloud provider fully deployed by Anyscale. |
| Customer-defined resource deployment on AWS or Google Cloud | Recommended for most use cases, unless you prefer to work on Kubernetes. This provides the greatest customization and includes support for custom networking. |
| Kubernetes deployment | Use a Kubernetes deployment when you have established Kubernetes infrastructure that you want to leverage for Ray workloads on Anyscale. When possible, use first-party offerings from cloud providers such as GKE, AKS, and EKS for the best Anyscale product experience. |
Serverless clouds
When you create a new Anyscale organization, Anyscale deploys a serverless cloud (sometimes called an Anyscale-hosted cloud) in your organization.
In this model, Anyscale manages all of the underlying infrastructure and storage used in your workloads.
Anyscale recommends serverless clouds primarily for users that are familiarizing themselves with the platform or trying out Ray for the first time.
Generally speaking, you can interact with serverless clouds the same way you would with self-hosted clouds, just without the need to worry about configuring underlying cloud infrastructure.
Some users might prefer to use serverless clouds to eliminate cloud configuration complexities. Review the Anyscale pricing page to estimate costs for your workloads.
Contact Anyscale support if you're having trouble deploying a serverless Anyscale cloud or need access to the following features on a serverless cloud:
- GPU compute instances.
- A serverless cloud running on Google Cloud.
- Custom cloud storage for data retention.
Anyscale provides temporary object storage as scratch storage on Anyscale-hosted clouds. $ANYSCALE_ARTIFACT_STORAGE retains data for up to 90 days from the date of creation. Anyscale removes all user data within a maximum of 120 days following account deactivation. Anyscale-hosted clouds may retain logs for up to 2 years. Users can request deletion of their Anyscale-hosted cloud account by contacting Anyscale support.