NVIDIA Triton vs TorchServe for SageMaker inference? When to recommend each?
Both are modern, production grade inference servers. TorchServe is the DLC default inference server for PyTorch models. Triton is also supported for PyTorch inference on SageMaker.
Anyone has a good comparison matrix for both?
Important notes to add here where both serving stacks differ:
TorchServe does not provide the Instance Groups feature that Triton does (that is, stacking many copies of the same model or even different models onto the same GPU). This is a major advantage for both realtime and batch use-cases, as the performance increase is almost proportional to the model replication count (i.e. 2 copies of the model get you almost twice the throughput and half the latency; check out a BERT benchmark of this here). Hard to match a feature that is almost like having 2+ GPU's for the price of one. if you are deploying PyTorch DL models, odds are you often want to accelerate them with GPU's. TensorRT (TRT) is a compiler developed by NVIDIA that automatically quantizes and optimizes your model graph, which represents another huge speed up, depending on GPU architecture and model. It is understandably so probably the best way of automatically optimizing your model to run efficiently on GPU's and make good use of TensorCores. Triton has native integration to run TensorRT engines as they're called (even automatically converting your model to a TRT engine via config file), while TorchServe does not (even though you can use TRT engines with it). There is more parity between both when it comes to other important serving features: both have dynamic batching support, you can define inference DAG's with both (not sure if the latter works with TorchServe on SageMaker without a big hassle), and both support custom code/handlers instead of just being able to serve a model's forward function.
Finally, MME on GPU (coming shortly) will be based on Triton, which is a valid argument for customers to get familiar with it so that they can quickly leverage this new feature for cost-optimization.
Bottom line I think that Triton is just as easy (if not easier) ot use, a lot more optimized/integrated for taking full advantage of the underlying hardware (and will be updated to keep being that way as newer GPU architectures are released, enabling an easy move to them), and in general blows TorchServe out of the water performance-wise when its optimization features are used in combination.