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This guide provides an in-depth overview of considerations when installing Thoras. For a quicker, higher-level guide to install and try out Thoras, check out the QuickStart Guide.

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Installing the Thoras license

Thoras will provide you a license key which should be made available to your installation. You have two options for managing this value:
  1. Pass the value into the Helm release via $.Values.imageCredentials.password, or
  2. Reference an existing secret
Let’s review both options — choose whichever works best for you!

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Option 1: Pass license in as Helm chart value

Pass the content of your license key file to $.Values.imageCredentials.password in your helm release

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Option 2: Reference existing secret

If you’d prefer to reference a pre-existing secret object instead of passing values into your helm release, this option is for you! Ensure a secret of type docker-registry exists in the thoras namespace and that it’s structured correctly:
  1. An example of how to create the secret manually: 
    kubectl create secret docker-registry thoras-license \
    --docker-server=us-east4-docker.pkg.dev/thoras-registry/platform \
    --docker-username=_json_key_base64 \
    --docker-password="{{ YOUR_LICENSE_KEY_CONTENT_HERE }}" \
    -n thoras
  2. In the helm values file, reference this secret by setting .Values.imageCredentials.secretRef: "thoras-license".

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Confirm license installed successfully

You can confirm the license has been installed successfully if the pods in the thoras namespace come up into Running status after one or two minutes. Pod error statuses such as ImagePullBackOff might indicate an issue.

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Configure Worker Capacity

Thoras is very lightweight but you’ll still want to allocate enough forecast workers to accommodate the number of workloads you’re managing:
  1. The number of workers is managed by the $.Values.thorasForecast.worker.replicas helm value
  2. The default number of workers is 1
  3. For maximum performance, Thoras recommends a 1:100 ratio of worker:AIScaleTarget
  4. For example, if you have 300 AIScaleTargets, you’ll want to set $.Values.thorasForecast.worker.replicas to 3

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Persistent Volumes

To enable production-grade predictions, Thoras requires a Kubernetes persistent volume (PV) for persisting historical usage metrics. It’s critical to ensure disk persistence is configured for any clusters that host workloads that people or things rely on. Read on for an overview!

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Understanding Storage Requirements

You’ll want to ensure Thoras has the disk space it needs now and in the future. This may or may not require configuration based on your backend storage provider.

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Understanding Usage

The storage requirements for a managed workload is 3GB. So for a cluster with twenty managed workloads, Thoras requires 60GB of disk space (20 AIScaleTargets * 3GB) == 60GB

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Understanding Kubernetes Storage Backend

In general there are two patterns for Kubernetes storage backends with regard to disk space configuration:

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Growable Storage Backends

These are PV storage backends that don’t enforce a fixed size — they dynamically grow as-needed and require no Thoras configuration to specify volume size. Examples include:
  • AWS Elastic File System (EFS)
  • Google Cloud Filestore (enterprise tier)
  • Azure Files
  • CephFS
Action: If you use one of these backends, you don’t need to allocate disk space in the Thoras configuration — the disk will automatically grow to meet your needs

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Fixed-Size Storage Backends

These are PV storage backends that require explicit provisioning of a fixed capacity and enforce the size specified in the PersistentVolumeClaim. These backends require you to specify the desired size of the disk, which you should configure as a Helm chart value (read on for details on how to do that). Examples include:
  • AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS)
  • Google Persistent Disk (GCP PD)
  • Azure Disk Storage
  • VMware vSphere Volumes
Action: If you use a fixed-size storage backend, you’ll need to specify the volume size as a Helm value:
  1. Determine how much total size will be needed using guidance above
  2. Configure the storage size by setting the following helm value:
metricsCollector:
  persistence:
    # Or whatever size needed based on your math from step #1
    pvcStorageRequestSize: "100Gi"

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Managing Persistent Volumes

You may have an established workflow for provisioning Kubernetes Persistent Volumes (PV). That’s great! Here’s how to get up and running depending on your preferred approach:

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Referencing an existing StorageClass provisioner

If you have a Kubernetes StorageClass that you’d like to use to dynamically provision your PV (such as an EFS StorageClass). In that case, simply reference the storage class name in your Thoras helm chart values.yaml: 
metricsCollector:
  persistence:
    enabled: true
    storageClassName: "{{ YOUR_STORAGE_CLASS_NAME }}"

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Referencing an existing PV

If you have a workflow for provisioning a PV and would like to simply reference the PV directly by name, add the following config block to your Helm values.yaml: 
metricsCollector:
  persistence:
    enabled: true
    volumeName: "{{ YOUR_VOLUME_NAME_HERE }}"

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Questions?

Don’t hesitate to reach out to your Thoras point of contact if you have any questions — we’ll help you move forward!
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