MLOps Tools
MLOps tools simplify the complex ML development process and enable maintainability and auditability with ML experiments.
What are MLOps Tools?
MLOps defines a set of practices that help standardize, simplify and streamline processes involved in ML systems deployment. It spans the entire lifecycle of ML models from research to development to post-deployment phases.
MLOps tools simplify the complex ML development process and enable enterprises to achieve the best possible returns with their AI investments. These tools become crucial as models move from local machines to a more complex production environment. These tools streamline the ML development process and help save developers time.
Types of MLOps Tools
MLOps tools are broadly classified into the following categories:
- Data Management
- Modeling
- Model Deployment and Serving
- Orchestration
Additionally, some MLOps tools serve end-to-end ML lifecycle management. These are unified MLOps platforms with an integrated feature set to support the entire ML lifecycle.
MLOps Tools: A Brief Overview
Data Management Tools
Data version control tools
Data versioning tools help track changes in data, improve workflows and collaboration, and build a repository for data. These tools enable reproducibility for your ML experiments.
Examples: DVC, Pachyderm, DAGsHUB, and LakeFS
Data labeling tools
These are also known as data annotation or tagging tools. These tools help label large volumes of data like images, text, and audio. This labeled data is used to train supervised machine learning algorithms.
Modeling Tools
Experiment Tracking Tools
Experiment tracking tools allow tracking the versions of ML experiments, results, and comparing different experiments. These tools save information about ML experiments with several models, training data, and parameters.
Examples: ModelDB, TensorBoard, Guild AI, Comet, Weights & Biases
Feature Engineering and Feature Store
Feature engineering tools enable automating useful features extraction from raw datasets. Feature store allows storing commonly used features and reusing these instead of rebuilding.
Model Deployment and Serving Tools
Model deployment and serving tools help you package, deploy and serve ML models in the production environment. These tools are selected based on these parameters:
- Model packaging framework compatibility and utilities
- Types of deployments supported such as Canary, Challenger V/s Champion, A/B test
- Built-in monitoring capabilities or support to integrate monitoring frameworks
Examples: BentoML, Kubeflow, TensorFlow Serving, KFServing, Seldon
Model monitoring tools
Machine learning model monitoring has become crucial as model performance degrades over time. Model monitoring tools indicate unforeseen performance issues such as drift, anomalies, skews and alert users to take the next action. These tools also track different performance metrics like accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and more.
Examples: Censius
Orchestration tools
Orchestration tools help you execute multistep workflows separately. These tools help in task sequencing, caching outputs, visualizing pipeline, and rerunning failed steps.
Examples: Airflow, Polyaxon, Kubeflow
Bottomline
Integrating the right MLOps tools help execute ML projects seamlessly while ensuring better maintainability and auditability for ML projects. Visibility into models behavior benefits ML teams to detect performance issues and shortcomings to avoid further losses.
Further Reading
The Best MLOps Tools and How to Evaluate Them
MLOps Tools & Platforms Landscape: In-Depth Guide
Machine Learning Ops (MLOps): In-depth Guide
Best Data Versioning Tools for MLOps
Selecting The Best Tools For Building Your MLOps Workflows