Deployment Overview¶
Deployments are done through Ansible in the deploy-ai repository. Contact dcline@mbari.org with any questions. For more detailed information about the general use of the tools and services this repository deploys, see the documentation at https://docs.mbari.org/internal/ai/.
⚙️ Installation¶
git clone github.com/mbari-org/deploy-ai.git
pip install ansible
For details on setting up a new project, see tator_new_project.md This is intended to discuss services that projects will need.
Each service is deployed with an Ansible playbook. Use the tabs below to find deployment commands, descriptions, and screenshots for each service.
ModelHub is an internal UI for browsing and running deployed ML models. It is not a comprehensive list of all models at MBARI, but rather a list of models used in the projects documented here.
It is served through the Cortex reverse proxy at https://cortex.shore.mbari.org/modelhub/.
For details on routing and troubleshooting, see modelhub.md.
This deploys a service that provides an API for vector similarity search using a Redis based Vector database. We call this service the Vector Similarity Search (VSS) service. The service is deployed to https://cortex.shore.mbari.org/vss/docs.
To use this service, select your project, then input your images, and it will return top-n classification of your images, the most similar unique IDs in the database, and the distance between the two. The embeddings can also be exported through this service through the API /embed endpoint.
This service is useful for searching for rare but distinctive concepts in large datasets and in the Voxel51 sync service.
ansible-playbook --key-file shared_id_rsa -i environment/prod playbooks/deploy_fastapi_vss.yml
Vector database concept¶
Vector service API¶
The service should be noted in green as up if it is working correctly in the service health dashboard.
This deploys a service that syncs data between Voxel51 and Tator.
ansible-playbook --key-file shared_id_rsa -i environment/prod playbooks/deploy_voxel51.yml
The service should be noted in green as up if it is working correctly in the service health dashboard.
This deploys the Tator tool to mantis.shore.mbari.org. Tator is a web-based annotation tool that provides a REST API for video and image annotation.
ansible-playbook --key-file shared_id_rsa -i environment/prod playbooks/deploy_tator.yml
Current projects on Tator¶
The service should be noted in green as up if it is working correctly in the service health dashboard.
Bulk Operations API¶
This deploys the FastAPI service that provides an API for bulk operations on Tator, such as bulk annotation. This is a standalone service not currently integrated into Tator, but useful for bulk operations after clustering.
ansible-playbook --key-file shared_id_rsa -i environment/prod playbooks/deploy_fastapi_tator.yml
The service should be noted in green as up if it is working correctly in the service health dashboard.
Drone is used with external collaborators to verify and add new annotations for the MBARI UAV project. Deployed to https://drone.mbari.org.
ansible-playbook --key-file shared_id_rsa -i environment/prod --limit drone playbooks/deploy_tator.yml
This deploys the Prometheus monitoring service for tracking service health and performance.
ansible-playbook --key-file shared_id_rsa -i environment/prod playbooks/deploy_prometheus.yml
The service should be noted in green as up if it is working correctly in the service health dashboard.
This deploys the NGINX reverse proxy and TLS certificate for the project. It also provides links to the project's tools and services. This is deployed to https://cortex.shore.mbari.org.
ansible-playbook --key-file shared_id_rsa -i environment/prod playbooks/deploy_nginx.yml
Tip
Logs can be seen on the devops mount at smb://thalassa.shore.mbari.org/DevOps. This can be useful for debugging issues with services in docker images.
🗓️ Updated: 2026-04-17