FAQ

vs. Notebooks

Product

Role

Problem and Solution

Apache Zeppelin, Jupyter Notebook

Notebook-style document + code frontends

Insecure host resource sharing

Backend.AI

Pluggable backend to any frontends

Built for multi-tenancy: scalable and better isolation

vs. Orchestration Frameworks

Product

Target

Value

Amazon ECS, Kubernetes

Long-running service daemons

Load balancing, fault tolerance, incremental deployment

Backend.AI

Stateful compute sessions

Low-cost high-density computation

Amazon Lambda, Azure Functions

Stateless, light-weight functions

Serverless, zero-management

vs. Big-data and AI Frameworks

Product

Role

Problem and Solution

TensorFlow, Apache Spark, Apache Hive

Computation runtime

Difficult to install, configure, and operate

Amazon ML, Azure ML, GCP ML

Managed MLaaS

Still complicated for scientists, too restrictive for engineers

Backend.AI

Host of computation runtimes

Pre-configured, versioned, reproducible, customizable (open-source)

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