A guideline for building practical production-level deep learning systems to be deployed in real world applications.
💡 A Guide to Production Level Deep Learning 🎬📜⛴
[NOTE: This repo is still under development, and any feedback to make it better is welcome 😊 ]
Deploying deep learning models in production can be challenging, as it is far beyond training models with good performance. Several distinct components need to be designed and developed in order to deploy a production level deep learning system (seen below):
This repo aims to be an engineering guideline for building production-level deep learning systems which will be deployed in real world applications.
The following figure represents a high level overview of different components in a production level deep learning system:
In the following, we will go through each module and recommend toolsets and frameworks as well as best practices from practitioners that fit each component.
Full stack pipeline
1. Data Management
1.1 Data Sources
Supervised deep learning requires a lot of labeled data
Labeling own data is costly!
Here are some resources for data:
Open source data (good to start with, but not an advantage)
Data augmentation (a MUST for computer vision, an option for NLP)
Synthetic data (almost always worth starting with, esp. in NLP)
1.2 Data Labeling
Requires: separate software stack (labeling platforms), temporary labor, and QC
Sources of labor for labeling:
Crowdsourcing (Mechanical Turk): cheap and scalable, less reliable, needs QC
Hiring own annotators: less QC needed, expensive, slow to scale
Feature Store: store, access, and share machine learning features
(Feature extraction could be computationally expensive and nearly impossible to scale, hence re-using features by different models and teams is a key to high performance ML teams).
Training data for production models may come from different sources, including Stored data in db and object stores, log processing, and outputs of other classifiers.
There are dependencies between tasks, each needs to be kicked off after its dependencies are finished. For example, training on new log data, requires a preprocessing step before training.
Makefiles are not scalable. "Workflow manager"s become pretty essential in this regard.
Airflow by Airbnb: Dynamic, extensible, elegant, and scalable (the most widely used)
DAG workflow
Robust conditional execution: retry in case of failure
Pusher supports docker images with tensorflow serving
Whole workflow in a single .py file
2. Development, Training, and Evaluation
2.1. Software engineering
Winner language: Python
Editors:
Vim
Emacs
VS Code (Recommended by the author): Built-in git staging and diff, Lint code, open projects remotely through ssh
Notebooks: Great as starting point of the projects, hard to scale (fun fact: Netflix’s Notebook-Driven Architecture is an exception, which is entirely based on nteract suites).
nteract: a next-gen React-based UI for Jupyter notebooks
Papermill: is an nteract library built for parameterizing, executing, and analyzing Jupyter Notebooks.
Commuter: another nteract project which provides a read-only display of notebooks (e.g. from S3 buckets).
Streamlit: interactive data science tool with applets
Comet: lets you track code, experiments, and results on ML projects
Weights & Biases: Record and visualize every detail of your research with easy collaboration
MLFlow Tracking: for logging parameters, code versions, metrics, and output files as well as visualization of the results.
Automatic experiment tracking with one line of code in python
Side by side comparison of experiments
Hyper parameter tuning
Supports Kubernetes based jobs
2.5. Hyperparameter Tuning
Approaches:
Grid search
Random search
Bayesian optimization
HyperBand
Platforms:
Katib: Kubernete's Native System for Hyperparameter Tuning and Neural Architecture Search, inspired by [Google vizier](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/ research.google.com/ja//pubs/archive/ bcb15507f4b52991a0783013df4222240e942381.pdf) and supports multiple ML/DL frameworks (e.g. TensorFlow, MXNet, and PyTorch).
Hyperas: a simple wrapper around hyperopt for Keras, with a simple template notation to define hyper-parameter ranges to tune.
SIGOPT: a scalable, enterprise-grade optimization platform
Sweeps from [Weights & Biases] (https://www.wandb.com/): Parameters are not explicitly specified by a developer. Instead they are approximated and learned by a machine learning model.
Keras Tuner: A hyperparameter tuner for Keras, specifically for tf.keras with TensorFlow 2.0.
2.6. Distributed Training
Data parallelism: Use it when iteration time is too long (both tensorflow and PyTorch support)
Model parallelism: when model does not fit on a single GPU
Other solutions:
Ray
Horovod
3. Troubleshooting [TBD]
4. Testing and Deployment
4.1. Testing and CI/CD
Machine Learning production software requires a more diverse set of test suites than traditional software:
Unit and Integration Testing:
Types of tests:
Training system tests: testing training pipeline
Validation tests: testing prediction system on validation set
Functionality tests: testing prediction system on few important examples
Continuous Integration: Running tests after each new code change pushed to the repo
SaaS for continuous integration:
Argo: Open source Kubernetes native workflow engine for orchestrating parallel jobs (incudes workflows, events, CI and CD).
CircleCI: Language-Inclusive Support, Custom Environments, Flexible Resource Allocation, used by instacart, Lyft, and StackShare.
CPU inference is preferable if it meets the requirements.
Scale by adding more servers, or going serverless.
GPU inference:
TF serving or Clipper
Adaptive batching is useful
(Bonus) Deploying Jupyter Notebooks:
Kubeflow Fairing is a hybrid deployment package that let's you deploy your Jupyter notebook codes!
4.5 Service Mesh and Traffic Routing
Transition from monolithic applications towards a distributed microservice architecture could be challenging.
A Service mesh (consisting of a network of microservices) reduces the complexity of such deployments, and eases the strain on development teams.
Istio: a service mesh to ease creation of a network of deployed services with load balancing, service-to-service authentication, monitoring, with few or no code changes in service code.
4.4. Monitoring:
Purpose of monitoring:
Alerts for downtime, errors, and distribution shifts
Catching service and data regressions
Cloud providers solutions are decent
Kiali:an observability console for Istio with service mesh configuration capabilities. It answers these questions: How are the microservices connected? How are they performing?
Are we done?
4.5. Deploying on Embedded and Mobile Devices
Main challenge: memory footprint and compute constraints
Solutions:
Quantization
Reduced model size
MobileNets
Knowledge Distillation
DistillBERT (for NLP)
Embedded and Mobile Frameworks:
Tensorflow Lite
PyTorch Mobile
Core ML
ML Kit
FRITZ
OpenVINO
Model Conversion:
Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX): open-source format for deep learning models