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MLOps Services Tools and Comparison | A Quick Guide

Dr. Jagreet Kaur Gill | 05 July 2023

MLOps Services Tools and Comparison

Machine Learning Model  Operationalization

Today Businesses are searching for ways to put Machine Learning in their arsenal to improve their decision-making. But in reality, it has been seen while adopting ml in business workflow; organizations face many problems. The main problem of the organizations is that they need help to produce the model and extract the business value from it. So here comes MLops in the picture. Inspired by the principles of DevOps, it tries to automate the whole ml lifecycle so that businesses can get what they need seamlessly, which is their business values.

Enable producibility, visibility, managed access control, and the computing resources to test, train, and deploy AI algorithms. Click to explore about our, MLOps Platform - Productionizing ML Models

How to do Operationzation of ML Models?

It is a collection of practices for communication and collaboration between operations professionals and data scientists. Applying these practices simplifies the management process, increases the quality, and automates the deployment of deep learning and machine learning models in large-scale production environments. It works with data developers, machine learning engineers, and DevOps to turn the algorithm into production systems once it's ready. It aims to improve production models' automation and quality while paying attention to business and regulatory requirements. The critical phases of MLOps are:

  • Data gathering
  • Data Analysis
  • Data transformation/preparation
  • Model training and development
  • Model validation
  • Model serving
  • Model monitoring
  • Model re-training
Automate ML Workflow and enable the sequence data to be transformed and correlated together in a model. Click to explore about our, Streamlining ML Projects with MLOPs and Azure ML

Why do we need ML Model Management?

Time before, organizations were dealing with fewer data and few models. But now the tables are turning. Now organizations are making decision automation in an extensive range of applications, which generates many challenges that come from deploying ML-based systems.

To understand MLOps, it is essential to understand the ML systems lifecycle. The lifecycle involves different teams of a data-driven organization.

  • Product team or Business Development -  Team which define business objective with KPIs
  • Data Engineering  - data preparation
  • Data Science - Defining ML solutions and developing models.
  • DevOps or IT- Complete setup deployment and monitoring alongside scientists.

Top Challenges to Adopt MLOps?

Managing systems at a large scale is not an easy task, so here are the following significant challenges that teams have to face:

Communication gaps - The main challenge between business and technical teams is communication. It is hard to find a common language to collaborate. Most of the time, this gap is the reason for big projects' failure.

Risk assessment - Risk assessment is also one of the significant challenges as models often tend to drift away from what they were giving results initially. Assessing the cost/risk of such failures is an essential and challenging task.

Reflecting changing business objectives in the model - There are many dependencies with the data continuously maintaining performance, changing model standards, and ensuring AI governance. It is challenging to keep up with the evolving business objectives and continuous model training.

AWS charges each SageMaker customer for the computation, storage, and data processing tools used to build, train, perform and log machine learning models and predictions.Know more about Amazon SageMaker.

MLOps Services are essentials for Enterprises

It as a service means that MLops is a set of practices that enables to maintenance and deploy ML systems functional in production reliably. It combines Data Engineering, DevOps, and ML. It helps to normalize the processes involved across the lifecycle of ML systems. Its services include:

Design algorithms

Design patterns are regularized best practices to solve problems when designing any software system. Five patterns (workflow pipelines, cascade, feature store, multimodel input) help add resilience, reproducibility, and flexibility to ML in production. Designing infrastructure for ML will have to give ML engineers, data engineers, and data scientists easy ways to implement design patterns.

The Design also includes Requirements engineering, ML use-cases Prioritization, and Data Availability check.

Model Development

Model development includes Data engineering, ML model engineering, and Model Testing and validation. Anyone wanting to learn about MLOps must first understand the model development process, a significant element of the ML project's life cycle. The model development process can range from simple to complex, depending on the conditions.

It plays an essential role for Data engineers as they are often blazing the trail to productionalizing ML for the organization. This often leaves data engineers with a difficult task at hand. Here it enters a solution that manages and monitors the lifecycle of ML models. With its help of it, data engineers can validate, update and test the deployments from a centralized hub no matter which type of ML models they are running.

Model Operations

In it, MLOps include ML pipeline Automation and full CI/CD pipeline automation.

Machine learning Pipeline Automation

There is an understanding that on the model, training/validation needs to be performed continuously on new data and managed in a CI/CD pipeline. The ML pipeline now evolves.

  • Experiments can happen faster, and Data scientists can think of hypothesis and rapidly deploy it on production.
  • The model can be re-trained and tested with new data based on results from the live model performance.
  • All components used to train and build the model are shareable and reusable across multiple pipelines.

Continuous Delivery Pipeline for Machine Learning

Engineers need an automated CI/CD system for machine learning pipelines in production. This helps the data science team rapidly explore hyperparameters, feature engineering, and model architecture ideas. Engineers can implement these ideas to automatically build, deploy and test the new pipeline components to the target environment.

What are the Top MLOps Tools?

There are tools available based on the purpose for which one wishes to use them. So to decide which tools to use, firstly, one must have a clear and concrete understanding of the task for which they will use that tool. Before choosing any tool, one should carefully consider the benefits and drawbacks of each tool before deciding on one for the project. Furthermore, this must ensure that the tools are compatible with the rest of the stack in use. There are tools available for performing the tasks, such as

Model Metadata Storage and Management

It provides a central place to display, compare, search, store, organize, review, and access all models and model-related metadata. The tools in this category as experiment tracking tools, model registries, or both. The various tools that one can use for metadata management and storage are-

  • Comet
  • Neptune AI
  • ML flow

Features

Comet

Neptune AI

ML flow

Launched in

2017

2017

2018

24×7 vendor support

Only for enterprise customers

Only for enterprise customers

Serverless UI

For CPU

Video metadata

Audio metadata

Data and Pipeline Versioning

Every team needs the necessary tools to stay updated and aligned with all version updates. Data versioning technologies can aid in creating a data repository, tracking experiments, and model lineage, reducing errors, and improving workflows and team cooperation. One can use various tools for this, such as;

  • DagsHub
  • Pachyderm
  • lakeFS
  • DVC

Features

Akira AI

DagsHub

Pachyderm

lakeFS

DVC

Launched in

2020

2019

2014

2020

 

Data format-agnostic

Cloud agnostic

Simple to use

Easy support for big data

Hyperparameter Tuning

Finding a set of hyperparameters that produces the best model results on a given dataset is known as hyperparameter optimization or hyperparameter tuning. Hyperparameter optimization tools are included in MLOps platforms that provide end-to-end machine learning lifecycle management. One can use various tools for hyperparameter tuning such as:

  • Ray tune
  • Optuna
  • HyperOpt
  • Scikit-Optimize

Features

HyperOpt

Ray Tune

Optuna

Scikit-Optimize

Algorithms used

Random Search, Tree of Parzen Estimators, Adaptive TPE

Ax/Botorch, HyperOpt, and Bayesian Optimization

AxSearch, DragonflySearch, HyperOptSearch, OptunaSearch, BayesOptSearch



Bayesian Hyperparameter Optimization

Distributed optimization

Handling large datasets

Uses GPU 

Framework support

Pytorch, Tensorflow

Pytorch, Tensorflow, XGBoost, LIghtGBM, Scikit-Learn, and Keras

Tf, Keras, PyTorch

Built on NumPy, SciPy, and Scikit-Learn

The primary role of DevOps is to take continuous feedback of the process at every step.  Click to explore about, Role of ML and AI in DevOps Transformation

Run Orchestration and Workflow Pipelines

A workflow pipeline and orchestration tool will help when the workflow contains many parts (preprocessing, training, and evaluation) that can be done separately. Production machine learning (ML) pipelines are designed to serve ML models to a company's end customers that augment the product and/or user journey. Machine learning orchestration (MLO) aids in the implementation and management of process pipelines from start to finish, influencing not just real users but also the bottom line. The various tools that one can use for running orchestration and workflow pipelines are:

  • Kedro
  • Apache Airflow
  • Polyaxon
  • Kubeflow

Features

Kedro

Kale

Flyte

Dagster

Lightweight

Focus

Reproducible, maintainable

Kubeflow pipeline & workflow

Create concurrent, scalable, and maintainable workflows

End-to-end ML pipelines

UI to visualize and manage workflow

Server interface with REST API

Scheduled workflows

Model Deployment and Serving

The technical task of exposing an ML model to real-world use is known as model deployment. Deployment is the process of integrating a machine learning model into an existing production environment in order to make data-driven business decisions. It's one of the last steps in the machine learning process, and it's also one of the most time-consuming. The various tools that one can use for model deployment and serving are:

  • Seldon
  • Cortex
  • BentoML

Features

BentoML

Cortex

Seldon

User interface

CLI, Web UI

CLI

Web UI, CLI

Metrics

Prometheus metrics

Prometheus metrics

Prometheus metrics

API Auto-Docs

Swagger/Open API

NA

Open API

Language

Python

Python and go wrapper

Python

Production Model Monitoring

The most crucial part after deploying any model to production is its monitoring, and if done in a proper way can save a lot of time and hassle (and money). Model monitoring includes monitoring input data drift, monitoring concept drift, and monitoring hardware metrics. The various tools that one can use for model monitoring after production are:

  • Akira AI
  • AWS SageMaker model monitor

Features

Akira AI

AWS Sagemaker MM

Fiddler

Detect data drift

Data integrity

Performance monitoring

Alerts

streamline-data-ingestions
A process that enables the developers to write code and estimate the application's intended behavior. Download to explore Machine Learning.

Conclusion

MLOps is a practice that aims to maintain and deploy ML models in production efficiently and reliably. It's practiced between ML engineers, Data scientists, and DevOps to convert the algorithm to production systems. When it started as the best practice, it was slowly developing into an independent approach to ML lifecycle management.

Over the few short years, it has grown in popularity, and several frameworks have emerged. Developing machine learning strategies now will help organizations to manage all kinds of success in the future.