Deploy Label Studio on Kubernetes

Deploy Label Studio on a Kubernetes Cluster using Helm 3. You can use this Helm chart to set up Label Studio for deployment onto a Kubernetes cluster and install, upgrade, and manage the application.

Your Kubernetes cluster can be self-hosted or installed somewhere such as Amazon EKS. See the Amazon tutorial on how to Deploy a Kubernetes Application with Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes for more about deploying an app on Amazon EKS.

Install Label Studio on Kubernetes

If you want to install Label Studio on Kubernetes and you have unrestricted access to the internet from your K8s cluster, follow these steps.

1. Verify that you meet the Required software prerequisites and review the capacity planning guidance.
2. Prepare the Kubernetes cluster.
3. Add the Helm chart repository.
4. (Optional) Set up persistent storage.
5. (Optional) Configure ingress.
6. (Optional) Configure values.yaml.
7. (Optional) Set up TLS for PostgreSQL
8. Use Helm to install Label Studio on your Kubernetes cluster.

If you use a proxy to access the internet from your Kubernetes cluster, or it is airgapped from the internet, see how to Install Label Studio without public internet access.

Required software prerequisites

• Kubernetes and kubectl version 1.17 or higher
• Helm version 3.6.3 or higher

This chart has been tested and confirmed to work with the NGINX Ingress Controller and cert-manager. See Set up an ingress controller for Label Studio Kubernetes deployments for more on ingress settings with Label Studio.

Your Kubernetes cluster can be self-hosted or installed somewhere such as Amazon EKS.

Capacity planning

To plan the capacity of your Kubernetes cluster, refer to these guidelines.

Label Studio has the following default configurations for resource requests, resource limits, and replica counts:

app:
  replicas: 1
  resources:
    requests:
      memory: 1024Mi
      cpu: 1000m
    limits:
      memory: 6144Mi
      cpu: 4000m

Before you make changes to these values, familiarize yourself with the Resource Management for Pods and Containers guidelines in the Kubernetes documentation.

If you choose to make changes to these default settings, consider the following:

For this case	Adjust this
More than 10 concurrent annotators	Adjust the requests and limits for resources in the app pod
Increase fault tolerance	Increase the number of replicas of app pod
Production deployment (replicas)	Replicas equivalent or greater than the number of availability zones in your Kubernetes cluster

Prepare the Kubernetes cluster

Before installing Label Studio, prepare the Kubernetes cluster with kubectl.

Add the Helm chart repository

Add the Helm chart repository to easily install and update Label Studio.

1. From the command line:

   helm repo add heartex https://charts.heartex.com/
   helm repo update heartex

2. If you want, check for available versions:

   helm search repo heartex/label-studio

Optional: set up TLS for PostgreSQL

To configure Label Studio to use TLS for end-client connections with PostgreSQL, do the following:

1. Enable TLS for your PostgreSQL instance and save Root TLS certificate, client certificate and its key for the next steps.

2. Create a Kubernetes secret with your certificates, replacing <PATH_TO_CA>, <PATH_TO_CLIENT_CRT> and <PATH_TO_CLIENT_KEY> with paths to your certificates:

   kubectl create secret generic <YOUR_SECRET_NAME> --from-file=ca.crt=<PATH_TO_CA> --from-file=client.crt=<PATH_TO_CLIENT_CRT> --from-file=client.key=<PATH_TO_CLIENT_KEY>

3. Update your ls-values.yaml file with your newly-created Kubernetes secret:

global:
  pgConfig:
    ssl:
      pgSslMode: "verify-full"
      pgSslSecretName: "<YOUR_SECRET_NAME>"
      pgSslRootCertSecretKey: "ca.crt"
      pgSslCertSecretKey: "client.crt"
      pgSslKeySecretKey: "client.key"

4. Install or upgrade Label Studio using Helm.

Use Helm to install Label Studio on your Kubernetes cluster

Use Helm to install Label Studio on your Kubernetes cluster. Provide your custom resource definitions YAML file. Specify any environment variables that you need to set for your Label Studio installation using the --set argument with the helm install command.

From the command line, run the following:

helm install <RELEASE_NAME> heartex/label-studio -f ls-values.yaml

After installing, check the status of the Kubernetes pod creation:

kubectl get pods

Restart Label Studio using Helm

Restart your Helm release by doing the following from the command line:

1. Identify the <RELEASE_NAME> of the latest Label Studio release:

   helm list

2. Restart the Label Studio app:

   kubectl rollout restart deployment/<RELEASE_NAME>-ls-app

Upgrade Label Studio using Helm

To upgrade Label Studio using Helm, do the following.

1. Determine the latest tag version of Label Studio and add/replace the following in your ls-values.yaml file:

   global:
     image:
       tag: "20210914.154442-d2d1935"

2. After updating the values file, retrieve the latest updates for the Helm chart:

   helm repo update heartex

3. Run the following from the command line to upgrade your deployment:

   helm upgrade <RELEASE_NAME> heartex/label-studio -f ls-values.yaml

   If you want, you can specify a version from the command line:

   helm upgrade <RELEASE_NAME> heartex/label-studio -f ls-values.yaml --set global.image.tag=20210914.154442-d2d1935

   This command overrides the tag value stored in ls-values.yaml. You must update the tag value when you upgrade or redeploy your instance to avoid version downgrades.

Uninstall Label Studio using Helm

To uninstall Label Studio using Helm, delete the configuration.

From the command line, run the following:

helm delete <RELEASE_NAME>