in Blog

May 04, 2023

Best MLOps Platforms in 2023

Author:




Artur Haponik

CEO & Co-Founder


Reading time:




11 minutes


Almost every company out there is trying to incorporate machine learning (ML) into their operations. According to a recent Refinitiv AI/ML survey, 46% of companies have entirely deployed machine learning in their business operations, while 44% of companies use it partially. [1] The main reason behind the mass adoption of machine learning is that it helps enterprises perform tasks on a scale and scope that was initially impossible to achieve. The increasing demand for building ML systems that solve the challenges of managing the software development lifecycle (SDLC) has given rise to a new DevOps-style engineering discipline known as MLOps.

So, what is MLOps [2], and what does it do?

This article will explore everything you need to know about MLOps, how it works, its benefits, and the best MLOps tools on the market today.

The function of MLOps tools

The name MLOps is derived from a fusion of two terms; machine learning and operations. It is a technique that establishes a set of best practices, ideas, procedures, standards, and norms for machine learning models. Instead of spending a lot of time and resources on machine learning development without a solid plan, MLOps aims to automate the complete lifecycle of ML algorithms in production.

With the help of MLOps, data scientists and IT operations teams can seamlessly collaborate and combine their skills to improve ML model development, deployment, and management. MLOps also aims to make machine learning model development more scalable for both ML operators and developers.

You can simply think of MLOps as the machine learning version of DevOps. This is because MLOps encompasses DevOps best practices such as Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) for streamlined model management. Additionally, both MLOps and DevOps are keen on collaboration, proper monitoring, knowledge sharing, validation, and governance across teams and technologies.

Benefits of using MLOps platforms

Buying an MLOps tool stands to help your ML team effectively manage various areas of machine learning development. It also stands to benefit your enterprise in the following ways:

  • Increases productivity within your business’s machine-learning lifecycle by automating repetitive tasks
  • Streamlines workflows and helps you focus on one task at a time
  • Reduces costs by minimizing the need for manual efforts over the entire machine-learning lifecycle
  • Enables you to monitor and get insights regarding the performance of every machine-learning model
  • Minimizes human errors and makes machine learning pipelines more reliable

Accelerate the implementation of machine learning processes with our MLOps Platform for Databricks.

Factors to consider when choosing an MLOps platform

Choosing the right machine learning operations platform ensures that your company takes full advantage of automated machine learning (AutoML) to build effective and scalable ML models.

However, as it’s usually the case with most nascent fields, a wide variety of MLOps tools have been developed in recent years to help with MLOps processes. This makes it a bit overwhelming to determine which tool suits your needs. Fortunately, there is a way around this.

The following are the various features you should look for when choosing the ideal MLOps platform:

Factors to consider when choosing an MLOps platform

Open-source or proprietary

Even though there is no right or wrong format for MLOps tools, open-source and proprietary tools usually offer different benefits. Open-source MLOps tools are usually free and easily adjustable to meet your business’s specific needs. It’s also worth noting that they can be easily integrated with other MLOps platforms if necessary. However, it can be quite difficult to configure open-source MLOps tools, especially if your company has few developers.

On the other hand, proprietary MLOps tend to be more expensive but usually offer a wide variety of features and support.

Coverage of required libraries

Data professionals usually use different languages and libraries when developing machine learning models. Therefore, the MLOps tool you choose should be able to support the languages and libraries required.

Some of the most popular machine learning libraries include Armadillo, Keras, FANN, Matplotlib, mlpack, NLTK, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Scikit-learn. [3]

When choosing your ideal MLOps platform, you should also consider the ease of installing and updating these libraries and languages. An MLOps tool that requires manual installation or updates will likely require more time to keep everything updated and running smoothly.

Model and production environment monitoring

It’s important to go for an MLOps tool equipped with model and production environment monitoring. This feature enables you to keep track of your model and production environments in real time to swiftly identify and fix any bugs that may appear. This ensures that everything runs smoothly at all times.

Without this feature, you won’t be able to identify any production bugs until they cause serious disruptions to your systems and business operations.

Collaboration and communication capabilities

The ideal MLOps tool should offer your team ways to communicate easily with each other. It should also be able to integrate well with existing collaboration tools such as Slack, Evernote Business, Notion, Scoro, Twist, Microsoft 365, and many others. [4] Without such capabilities, it will be difficult for some people on your team to showcase their expertise.

Scalability

The MLOps platform you choose should be able to handle increasing workloads as your business grows. You want to adopt a tool that will accommodate increasing volumes of data, resources, and customers without unnecessary downtimes. This is the best way to ensure that your company maintains a high-quality standard and efficiency for all its operations.

mlops platform

Pipeline management

Effective pipeline management allows you to automate different MLOps processes such as coding, data preparation, data management, model building, model training, testing, and deployment. By automating these repetitive tasks, you’re able to save time and resources.

Some MLOps tools are so advanced to the extent that they can automatically make the necessary updates in these areas once a change occurs.

Model templating and cataloging

Whenever a strong machine learning model is created, various teams usually want to duplicate and scale it many times over. This is usually a time-consuming process. But an MLOps tool with a templating feature can help you create templates for your ML models and deploy them easily.

On the other hand, a cataloging feature makes it easier for you to find templates of different ML models through catalogs. Both features can save you a lot of time and effort when deploying ML models. This explains why MLOps platforms with templating and cataloging features are so popular among MLOps teams.

CLI or GUI

Before choosing a given MLOps tool for your business, you ought to decide whether you want a command-line interface (CLI) or a graphical user interface (GUI). Even though some of the tools on the market today offer both interfaces, their design usually highlights one interface over the other.

Some people prefer GUI because they’re visually intuitive and don’t require coding knowledge. As a result, users usually learn how to use GUI faster than CLI. On the other hand, other users prefer CLI because it’s more flexible, faster, and better customized to suit their specific needs. With that said, there is no right or wrong when choosing between CLI and GUI. It all depends on your personal preferences. [5]

Cloud-agnostic or cloud-specific

Cloud-agnostic MLOps tools can be used with any cloud provider of choice. On the other hand, cloud-specific MLOps tools are usually designed to work with only one cloud provider. If you prefer using a specific cloud provider, then it’s best to choose an MLOps platform of that particular provider. For example, you can opt for the Google Cloud AI platform, AWS SageMaker, or Azure Machine Learning.

However, if you’re considering multiple cloud providers, you should go with a cloud-agnostic MLOps tool. Both options have their advantages and disadvantages, so it’s up to you to decide what’s best for your company. If you’re unsure about which MLOps platform to choose, it’s in your best interest to enlist the MLOps consulting [6] services of an expert to help you make a more informed decision.

Product support

The MLOps tool you choose should offer product support in case you run into trouble when using it. Some MLOps platforms charge an extra fee for their product support, while others offer it free of charge. Some platforms also offer product support during business hours only, while others offer 24-hour support.

The last thing you want is to encounter an issue with your MLOps tool and have no one to assist you. Therefore, ensure you compare the kind of product support offered by different platforms before making your purchase.

Top-Rated MLOps Platforms in 2023

The following are the best MLOps platforms for managing the machine learning lifecycle in 2023:

Amazon SageMaker

Amazon SageMaker is basically Amazon’s one-stop shop for all things machine learning and deep learning. There are many reasons why this platform is one of the best machine-learning operations tools out there. However, what stands out the most about Amazon SageMaker is its emphasis on drift management and monitoring.

MLOps platform, Amazon SageMaker interface

Source: aws.amazon.com

This tool provides you with real-time alerts of the models, data sets, and algorithms that need to be fixed over time. With the help of Amazon SageMaker, data professionals and ML/deep learning engineers can enhance productivity by quickly building, training, testing, and deploying machine learning models into a production-ready hosted environment.

This platform also seamlessly integrates machine learning workflows with CI/CD pipelines to help reduce the time and effort required during production. It comes with an ‘autopilot’ functionality to specifically help users without any working knowledge of machine learning and deep learning.

The platform also supports a wide variety of machine learning frameworks and programming languages, including Python, TensorFlow, R, Jupyter, MXNet, and many others.

TensorFlow (TFX)

TensorFlow Extended was publicly released by Google back in 2015[7]. This open-source MLOps platform for mathematical computation helps you deploy a trained machine learning model at an endpoint much faster. It provides you with shared libraries and frameworks for integrating machine learning with your company’s existing workflow.

tensorflow dashboard

Source: tensorflow.org

With the help of TensorFlow, you can build, train, troubleshoot, deploy, and maintain machine learning models with ease. You can orchestrate machine learning workflows on different platforms, such as KubeFlow, Apache, and Beam. This platform can also automatically or manually generate metadata during data analysis, which you can use to train your machine-learning models. [8]

Azure Machine Learning

Azure Machine Learning is a cloud-based MLOps tool for data science and machine learning. You can use this platform to train, test, automate, deploy, and track any machine learning models of your choice in real time. It is suitable for all types of machine learning, including classical machine learning, supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, and deep learning.

Screenshot of metrics for a training run, azure machine learning platform

Source: learn.microsoft.com

This platform comes with built-in compliance, governance, and security, enabling users to run machine learning workloads from anywhere. Azure Machine Learning supports programming languages like Python and R. The tool also has a drag-and-drop visual designer and an AutoML option to help with fine-tuning your ML models.

You can easily boost your company’s production by combining Microsoft Power BI and a host of Azure Machine Learning features such as Azure Data Lake, Azure Databricks, Azure Cognitive Search, Azure Arc, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Factory, and Azure Security Center.
Azure Machine Learning also integrates well with other top MLOps tools such as MLflow, PyTorch, Git, and TensorFlow.

Domino Data Lab

Domino Data Lab is a popular MLOps platform that enables data professionals to build and deploy machine learning models with an emphasis on governance and collaboration. This tool focuses on creating a centralized repository and viewing point for all MLOps data. This allows data professionals to reuse code models from previous machine-learning projects.

This MLOps platform also allows you to use your favorite MLOps tools on the infrastructure of your choice to track experiments and compare results with others. It supports the entire lifecycle of a machine learning project, allowing businesses to become more machine learning-driven.

The bottom line

Over the last few years, the MLOps industry has grown exponentially. It seems that every other week we see a new MLOps startup or platform launching to help businesses streamline their machine learning lifecycle and create economic value from unstructured data.

That said, we hope this guide will help you create a more elaborate ML roadmap for your business and opt for the ideal MLOps tool that suits your needs. Discover our MLOps Platform.

References

[1] Refinitiv.com. AI, ML Survey. URL: https://refini.tv/3M5yijO. Accessed April 28, 2023
[2] Addepto.com. MLOPS: What is it and How to Implement it. URL: https://addepto.com/blog/mlops-what-is-it-and-how-to-implement-it/. Accessed April 28, 2023
[3] Hackr.io. Machine Learning Libraries. URL: https://hackr.io/blog/best-machine-learning-libraries. Accessed April 29, 2023
[4] Techradar.com. Best Online Collaboration Tools. URL: https://www.techradar.com/best/best-online-collaboration-tools, Accessed April 29, 2023
[5] Phoenixnap.com. CLIvs GUI. URL: https://phoenixnap.com/kb/cli-vs-gui, Accessed April 29, 2023
[6] Addepto.com. MLOps Consulting. URL: https://addepto.com/mlops-consulting/. Accessed April 29, 2023
[7] Tensorflow.org. Brief History of TensorFlow extended tfx. URL: https://blog.tensorflow.org/2020/09/brief-history-of-tensorflow-extended-tfx.html. Accessed April 29, 2023
[8] Towardsdatascience.com. How to Train a Machine Learning Model in 5 Minutes. URL: https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-train-a-machine-learning-model-in-5-minutes-c599fa20e7d5. Accessed April 29, 2023



Category:


MLOps