Understanding Rasa Deployments

In this series we're going to talk about how Rasa deployments work. We're mainly going to discuss the underlying technologies behind a Rasa deployment and how to use them to deploy Rasa.

Video#

Understanding Rasa Deployments#

At some point you might want to deploy your Rasa project via Rasa X. This way, you'll be able to collect data from your users and you'll have a tight integration with Github. Instead of running your own servers manually you'd typically deploy Rasa X by running it on Kubernetes. This way the Rasa X deployment is easier to scale and maintain.

But if you're unfamiliar with Kubernetes, this can be daunting task. The goal of this series of videos is to teach you how to deploy Rasa from the ground up. We'll discuss the Rasa X architecture but we'll also explain topics that are relevant to deploying Rasa, like docker, helm and kubernetes.

The course is designed in such a way that if you already know how to run and build a Rasa assitant on your local machine that you'll be able to understand how to deploy it to the outside world.

Installation#

You can watch the videos at your leisure but if you want to follow along you will need to install some software for this course. We assume that you're working on a mac or linux machine that is able to run docker, kind and helm on the command line.

Installing Rasa#

Below you can find installation guides for Rasa, if you haven't downloaded that already.

Running on a VM#

If you'd like to following along by running everything on a Ubuntu VM, the following snippet should take care of everything.

# Link up repositories
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl
sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/kubernetes-archive-keyring.gpg https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/kubernetes-archive-keyring.gpg] https://apt.kubernetes.io/ kubernetes-xenial main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kubernetes.list
sudo apt-get update

# Run all install commands
sudo apt-get install -y kubectl
apt install docker.io
curl -fsSL -o get_helm.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/master/scripts/get-helm-3
chmod 700 get_helm.sh
./get_helm.sh
curl -Lo ./kind https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/dl/v0.11.1/kind-linux-amd64
chmod +x ./kind