Scale a Gradio App with Ray Serve

This guide shows how to scale up your Gradio application using Ray Serve. Keep the internal architecture of your Gradio app intact, with no code changes. Simply wrap the app within Ray Serve as a deployment and scale it to access more resources.

This tutorial uses Gradio apps that run text summarization and generation models and use Hugging Face's Pipelines to access these models.

:::{note} Remember you can substitute this app with your own Gradio app if you want to try scaling up your own Gradio app. :::

Dependencies

To follow this tutorial, you need Ray Serve, Gradio, and transformers. If you haven't already, install them by running:

$ pip install "ray[serve]" gradio==3.50.2 torch transformers

Example 1: Scaling up your Gradio app with GradioServer

The first example summarizes text using the T5 Small model and uses Hugging Face's Pipelines to access that model. It demonstrates one easy way to deploy Gradio apps onto Ray Serve: using the simple GradioServer wrapper. Example 2 shows how to use GradioIngress for more customized use-cases.

First, create a new Python file named demo.py. Second, import GradioServer from Ray Serve to deploy your Gradio app later, gradio, and transformers.pipeline to load text summarization models.

:start-after: __doc_import_begin__
:end-before: __doc_import_end__

Then, write a builder function that constructs the Gradio app io.

:start-after: __doc_gradio_app_begin__
:end-before: __doc_gradio_app_end__

Deploying Gradio Server

To deploy your Gradio app onto Ray Serve, you need to wrap the Gradio app in a Serve deployment. GradioServer acts as that wrapper. It serves your Gradio app remotely on Ray Serve so that it can process and respond to HTTP requests.

By wrapping your application in GradioServer, you can increase the number of CPUs and/or GPUs available to the application. :::{note} Ray Serve doesn't support routing requests to multiple replicas of GradioServer, so you should only have a single replica. :::

:::{note} GradioServer is simply GradioIngress but wrapped in a Serve deployment. You can use GradioServer for the simple wrap-and-deploy use case, but in the next section, you can use GradioIngress to define your own Gradio Server for more customized use cases. :::

:::{note} Ray can’t pickle Gradio. Instead, pass a builder function that constructs the Gradio interface. :::

Using either the Gradio app io, which the builder function constructed, or your own Gradio app of type Interface, Block, Parallel, etc., wrap the app in your Gradio Server. Pass the builder function as input to your Gradio Server. Ray Serves uses the builder function to construct your Gradio app on the Ray cluster.

:start-after: __doc_app_begin__
:end-before: __doc_app_end__

Finally, deploy your Gradio Server. Run the following in your terminal, assuming that you saved the file as demo.py:

$ serve run demo:app

Access your Gradio app at http://localhost:8000 The output should look like the following image:

See the Production Guide for more information on how to deploy your app in production.

Example 2: Parallelizing models with Ray Serve

You can run multiple models in parallel with Ray Serve by using model composition in Ray Serve.

Suppose you want to run the following program.

1. Take two text generation models, gpt2 and distilgpt2.
2. Run the two models on the same input text, so that the generated text has a minimum length of 20 and maximum length of 100.
3. Display the outputs of both models using Gradio.

The following is a comparison of an unparallelized approach using vanilla Gradio to a parallelized approach using Ray Serve.

Vanilla Gradio

This code is a typical implementation:

:start-after: __doc_code_begin__
:end-before: __doc_code_end__

Launch the Gradio app with this command:

demo.launch()

Parallelize using Ray Serve

With Ray Serve, you can parallelize the two text generation models by wrapping each model in a separate Ray Serve deployment. You can define deployments by decorating a Python class or function with @serve.deployment. The deployments usually wrap the models that you want to deploy on Ray Serve to handle incoming requests.

Follow these steps to achieve parallelism. First, import the dependencies. Note that you need to import GradioIngress instead of GradioServer like before because in this case, you're building a customized MyGradioServer that can run models in parallel.

:start-after: __doc_import_begin__
:end-before: __doc_import_end__

Then, wrap the gpt2 and distilgpt2 models in Serve deployments, named TextGenerationModel.

:start-after: __doc_models_begin__
:end-before: __doc_models_end__

Next, instead of simply wrapping the Gradio app in a GradioServer deployment, build your own MyGradioServer that reroutes the Gradio app so that it runs the TextGenerationModel deployments.

:start-after: __doc_gradio_server_begin__
:end-before: __doc_gradio_server_end__

Lastly, link everything together:

:start-after: __doc_app_begin__
:end-before: __doc_app_end__

:::{note} This step binds the two text generation models, which you wrapped in Serve deployments, to MyGradioServer._d1 and MyGradioServer._d2, forming a model composition. In the example, the Gradio Interface io calls MyGradioServer.fanout(), which sends requests to the two text generation models that you deployed on Ray Serve. :::

Now, you can run your scalable app, to serve the two text generation models in parallel on Ray Serve. Run your Gradio app with the following command:

$ serve run demo:app

Access your Gradio app at http://localhost:8000, and you should see the following interactive interface:

See the Production Guide for more information on how to deploy your app in production.