A Beginner’s Guide to MLOps

With the fast development in the machine learning frameworks, comparative approaches are being created within the capacity of ML engineering, which handles the special complexity of the practical application of machine learning. MLOps are in charge of this, which is a collection of established methods and technological capabilities for fast and reliably designing, deploying, and operationalizing machine learning systems. This article is mainly focused on covering the basic concepts related to MLOps that is intended to let you understand MLOps from the very basics. The concepts that we will discuss further in the article are listed below.

Table of Contents

1. What is MLOps?
2. Life Cycle of MLOps
3. End to end Workflow
4. Benefits of MLOps

What is MLOps?

MLOps, often known as Machine Learning Operations, is a collection of techniques aimed at consistently and quickly deploying and maintaining machine learning models into production. This term is a combination of ‘machine learning’ with the software industry’s continuous development practice known as DevOps. 

In an isolated experimental system, machine learning models are evaluated and developed. When an algorithm is ready for deployment, MLOps is used by Data Scientists, DevOps, and machine learning engineers to move it to the production system. MLOps strives to boost automation and improve the quality of production models, similar to DevOps and DataOps techniques.       

The complexity that needed to be addressed by MLOps are:

• Preparing and Keeping high-quality data for model training.
• Tracking the model in production to detect the performance degradation.
• Performing ongoing experimentations on new data instances, various algorithms, tuning hyperparameters, and then tracking all these experiments.
• Maintaining the accuracy of models by continuously retraining on fresh data.
• Handling concerns about model fairness and adversarial attacks.

MLOps restores business interest to the forefront of your machine learning application. Data scientists approach their job through the lens of organizational interest, with clear goals and verifiable benchmarks. It combines the finest of both the world.  

Life Cycle of MLOps

The MLOps life cycle consists of seven interconnected and iterative stages as shown in the below chart.

Let’s take a look at it one by one.

ML Development

ML development entails experimenting with and establishing a stable and reproducible model training approach, basically training pipeline code, which includes a variety of tasks ranging from data preparation and transformation through model training and evaluation. 

Training Operationalization 

Automation of testing and deployment of repeatable and dependable training pipelines is part of training operationalization, which is concerned with automating the process. 

Continuous Training

In continuous training, the training pipeline is executed repeatedly in reaction to the fresh data or code changes, or on schedule changes, with new training settings depending on circumstances.       

Model Deployment

Packaging and testing a model for online experimentation and production serving is part of the model deployment process. 

Prediction Serving

Serving the model in production for inferences is what prediction serving is all about.

Continuous Monitoring

The purpose of continuous monitoring is to keep track of deployed model’s effectiveness and efficiency. 

Data and Model Management

Data and model management is a key, cross-cutting activity for regulating ML artefacts and ensuring integrity, traceability, and compliance. Data and model management can also help ML assets be more shareable, reusable, and discoverable.    

End to end Workflow

The below workflow shows a simplified yet canonical flow for how the MLOps process is interacting with each other, focusing on high-level control flow and essential inputs and outputs. It is not necessary that the process needs to be followed as shown some of can be skipped and can be repeated in a particular phase. 

Experimentation is the most important activity during the stage of machine learning development. Data scientists and ML engineers prototype model architectures and training routines produced labelled datasets and use features and other reusable ML artefacts defined by the data and model management process. A defined training technique, which includes data preparation, model architecture, and model training settings are the principal result of this process.   

The training approach is operationalized as a training pipeline if the ML system requires continuous training. To create, test and deploy the pipeline to the target execution environment, a CI/CD (continuous integration, continuous deployment)  process is required.   

The continuous training pipeline runs multiple times based on retraining triggers, and it outputs a model. When new data becomes available or if model performance begins to deteriorate, the model is retrained. The metadata and other training artefacts produced by the training pipeline are likewise tracked. 

The deployed model uses a deployment pattern we specify to serve predictions as online, batch, or streaming. The serving runtime can also create model explanations and capture serving logs for use by the continuous monitoring process, in addition to serving predictions.   

The continuous monitoring method checks the model for predicted efficacy and service. The fundamental focus of effective performance measuring is recognizing model deteriorations, such as data drift. The model deployment can also be monitored for efficiency measures like latency, hardware resources use, and execution failure.   

Benefits of MLOps  

Compliance 

The regulatory and compliance section of operation is one of the most important functions in the organization’s eco-space, especially with the introduction of ML from a business perspective. MLOps keep the IT team ahead of the curve with best practices and growing regulatory alliances. MLOps may renew models based on demand and compliance while ensuring that the current system remains in regular compliances even if the generated model and ML pipelines grow.   

Correct Data Usage

MLOps significantly relies on big data when it comes to managing effective company operations. The strategy tends to improve the product with each successive iteration, shortening the development life cycle and yielding powerful insights. MLOps also converge on a large amount of feedback, which aids in determining what is noise in data and which abnormalities require attention. 

Communication and Workflow

MLOps is defined in a well-structured style and follows a set of techniques to seamlessly unify the development cycle and operation process to make it more and more efficient. The data science team particularly is well versed in data while the operation team is in business acumen. In this situation, MLOps boosts ML models while leveraging the experience from both the team. As MLOps modify ML production pipelines to be more adaptable and agile to coordinate KPI-driven models, this collaboration minimizes constraints created by the advanced algorithm.         

Risk Mitigation

Businesses are constantly at risk and losing clients’ trust, being unable to reach target audiences, and so on as a result of erroneous deceptive models. For example, training data and available real-world complicated data are different results making poor prediction because they are driven by models making them less liable, here MLOps decreases the business risk in this case. It also helps to avoid biases during building a model. 

Conclusion

In this article, we have seen various concepts of MLOps along with some practical scenarios. Basically, it is a systematic process for developing, deploying, and maintaining your machine learning project which ultimately ensures you reliable and beneficial operation.

References

• Google Cloud Whitepaper on MLOps