Building MLOps Teams

As organisations continue to embrace machine learning to derive insights, improve model accuracy and predictive capabilities, it’s clear for many clients that the path from model development to deployment is not seamless. Challenges in reproducibility, scalability, monitoring and collaboration often arise which hinders development and consequently business impact.

Applying the principles of DevOps to machine learning, MLOps aims to shorten the lifecycle of ML model development, ensuring faster more efficient deployment and continuous improvement. Its core objectives are to improve collaboration among the different roles involved, enhance the quality and reliability of ML models and reduce the time taken to deliver value to the end-users.

The unique aspect of MLOps is it’s amalgamation of the diverse responsibilities of data engineering, DevOps, and machine learning into a ‘streamlined’ process.

1. Data Engineering – MLOps leverages data engineering by ensuring data used in ML models is clean, reliable and available. It implements data versioning, feature stores and data pipelines to ensure consistent high-quality data.
2. DevOps – Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Deployment (CD) and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) are integral to MLOps. It’s about integrating ML models into production environments safely and efficiently, automating testing, and maintaining scalability, performance and security.
3. Machine Learning – MLOps is about maximising the potential of ML models. It does this by focusing on the entire machine learning lifecycle (development to deployment and monitoring). MLOps ensures reproducibility by versioning models, their parameters and training data. It also monitors models in production to detect issues early and ensures they are performing as expected e.g model drift.

MLOps is emerging as a key practice for companies looking to scale their use of machine learning and gain a competitive edge. By blending the responsibilities of data engineering, DevOps, and machine learning, MLOps fundamentally speeds up the time to value for machine learning projects.