I currently have a simple Machine Learning infrastructure running locally and I want to migrate this all onto Google Cloud. I simply fetch the data I need from a database, build my model and then test the model on test data. This is all done in PyCharm locally.
I want to simply migrate this and have the possibility for all this to be done on Google Cloud, while having the flexibility to make local changes that can apply when run on the cloud as well. There are many Google Cloud resources relating to this and so I am looking for best practices people follow on running such a procedure.
Thanks and please let me know if there are any clarifications needed.
I highly suggest you to take a look at this machine learning workflow in the cloud which consists of:
Data Ingestion and Collection
Storing the data.
Processing data.
ML training.
ML deployment.
Data Ingestion and Collection
There are multiple resources you can use if you would like to ingest data with Google Cloud Platform. The simplest solution I can recommend to you are both Google Compute Engine or an App Engine App (for example for a forum where a user fill some data up).
Nonetheless, if you would like to ingest data in real-time, you can also use Cloud Pub/Sub.
Storing the data
As you mentioned, you are retrieving all the information from a database. If you are used to work with SQL or NoSQL I highy suggest you to go after Cloud SQL. Not only provides a good interface when building your instance, but also lets you access it securely and very rapidly.
If it not the case, you can also use Google Cloud Storage or BigQuery, but over those two, I will pick BigQuery since it has also the possibility to work with stream data.
Processing data
For processing data before feeding it to the model you can use either:
Cloud DataFlow: Cloud Dataflow is a fully-managed service for transforming and enriching data in stream (real time) and batch (historical) modes with equal reliability and expressiveness -- no more complex workarounds or compromises needed.
Cloud Dataproc: Dataproc is a fast, easy-to-use, fully managed cloud service for running Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop clusters in a simpler, more cost-efficient way.
Cloud Dataprep: Cloud Dataprep by Trifacta is an intelligent data service for visually exploring, cleaning, and preparing structured and unstructured data for analysis, reporting, and machine learning.
ML training & ML deployment
For training/deploying your ML model I would suggest to use AI platform.
AI Platform makes it easy for machine learning developers, data scientists, and data engineers to take their ML projects from ideation to production and deployment, quickly and cost-effectively.
If you have to work with huge datasets, the best practices are run the model as a Tensorflow job with AI Platform so you can have a training cluster.
Finally for deploying your models using AI Platform, you can take a look here.
Related
Are there experiment management platforms that also allow
storing and managing training datasets (images, in my case)? I am familiar with the ML-Flow, but AFAIK it doesn't support such an option, am I right? If there are no platforms like this, how would you suggest managing training datasets in combination with existing platforms?
You can use a cloud service's object storage to store and manage your training dataset. Any cloud provider has such a solution. Then, your code should allow ingesting data from storage buckets to train and do experiment tracking.
What is the difference between GCP pipeline services:
Cloud Dataflow and Cloud Data fusion ...
which to you when?
I did a high level pricing taking 10 instances with Basic in Data fusion.
and 10 instance cluster (n1-standard-8) in Dataflow.
The pricing is more than double for Datafusion.
What are the pros and cons for each over one another
Cloud Dataflow is purpose built for highly parallelized graph processing. And can be used for batch processing and stream based processing. It is also built to be fully managed, obfuscating the need to manage and understand underlying resource scaling concepts e.g how to optimize shuffle performance or deal with key imbalance issues. The user/developer is responsible for building the graph via code; creating N transforms and or operations to achieve desired goal. For example: read files from storage, process each line in file, extract data from line, cast data to numeric, sum data in groups of X, write output to data lake.
Cloud Data Fusion is focused on enabling data integration scenarios => reading from source (via extensible set of connectors) and writing to targets e.g. BigQuery, storage, etc. It does have parallelization concepts, but they are not fully managed like Cloud Dataflow. CDF rides on top of Cloud Dataproc which is a managed version for Hadoop based processing. It's sweet spot is visual based graph development leveraging an extensible set of connectors and operators.
Your question is based on "cost" concepts. My advice is to take a step back and define what your processing/graph goal(s) look like. Then look at each products value. If you want full control over processing semantics with greater focus on analytics and want to run in batch and or must have streaming focus on Dataflow. If you want point and click data movement, with less focus need on data analytics AND do not need streaming then look at CDF.
Is there a suggested way to serve hundreds of machine learning models in Kubernetes?
Solutions like Kfserving seem to be more suitable for cases where there is a single trained model, or a few versions of it, and this model serves all requests. For instance a typeahead model that is universal across all users.
But is there a suggested way to serve hundreds or thousands of such models? For example, a typeahead model trained specifically on each user's data.
The most naive way to achieve something like that, would be that each typeahead serving container maintains a local cache of models in memory. But then scaling to multiple pods would be a problem because each cache is local to the pod. So each request would need to get routed to the correct pod that has loaded the model.
Also having to maintain such a registry where we know which pod has loaded which model and perform updates on model eviction seems like a lot of work.
You can use Catwalk mixed with Grab.
Grab has a tremendous amount of data that we can leverage to solve
complex problems such as fraudulent user activity, and to provide our
customers personalized experiences on our products. One of the tools
we are using to make sense of this data is machine learning (ML).
That is how Catwalk is created: an easy-to-use, self-serve, machine
learning model serving platform for everyone at Grab.
More infromation about Catwalk you can find here: Catwalk.
You can serve multiple Machine Learning models using TensorFlow and Google Cloud.
The reason the field of machine learning is experiencing such an epic
boom is because of its real potential to revolutionize industries and
change lives for the better. Once machine learning models have been
trained, the next step is to deploy these models into usage, making
them accessible to those who need them — be they hospitals,
self-driving car manufacturers, high-tech farms, banks, airlines, or
everyday smartphone users. In production, the stakes are high and one
cannot afford to have a server crash, connection slow down, etc. As
our customers increase their demand for our machine learning services,
we want to seamlessly meet that demand, be it at 3AM or 3PM.
Similarly, if there is a decrease in demand we want to scale down the
committed resources so as to save cost, because as we all know, cloud
resources are very expensive.
More information you cna find here: machine-learning-serving.
Also you can use Seldon.
Seldon Core is an open source platform for deploying machine learning models on a Kubernetes cluster.
Features:
deploying machine learning models in the cloud or on-premise.
gaining metrics ensuring proper governance and compliance for your
running machine learning models.
creating inference graphs made up of multiple components.
providing a consistent serving layer for models built using
heterogeneous ML toolkits.
Useful documentation: Kubernetes-Machine-Learning.
I'm currently designing a data warehouse in BigQuery. I'm planning to store user data like past purchases or abandoned carts.
This seems to be perfect to manually analyze trends and to get insights. But what if I want to leverage Machine Learning, e.g. to suggest products to a group of users?
I have looked into Google ML Engine and TensorFlow, and it seems like the TensorFlow model would need to query BigQuery first. In some scenarios, this could mean that TensorFlow would need to query all or most of the data that is stored in BigQuery.
This feels a bit off, so I'm wondering if this is really how things are supposed to happen. Otherwise, I assume that my ML model would have to work with stale data?
So I would agree with you, using BigQuery as a data warehouse for your ML is expensive. It would be cheaper and much more efficient to use Google Cloud Storage to store all the data you wish to process. Once everything is processed and generated, you may then wish to push that data to BigQuery push that data to another source like Spanner or even Cloud Storage.
That being said Google has now created a beta product BigQuery ML. This now allows users to create and execute machine learning models in BigQuery via the use of SQL queries. I believe it uses python and tensorflow under the hood, but I believe it would be the best solution given that you have a light weight ML load.
Since it is still in beta as of now, I don't know well it's performance compares to Google ML engine and tensorflow.
Depending on what kind of model you want to train and how you want to server the model you can do one the following options:
You can export your data to Google Cloud Storage as CSV and then read the files in Cloud ML Engine. This will let you use the power of Tensorflow and you can then use Cloud ML Engine's serving system to send traffic to your model.
On the downside, this means that you have to export all of your BigQuery data to GCS and every time you decide to make any change to the data you need to go back to BigQuery and export again. Also if the data you want to prediction on is in BigQuery you have to export that as well and send it to Cloud ML Engine using a separate system.
If you want to explore and interactively train Logistic or Linear regression models on your data, you can use BigQuery Machine learning. This will allow you to slice and dice your data in BigQuery and experiment with different parts of your data and various preprocessing options. You can also use all the power of SQL. BigQuery ML also allows you to use the model after training within BigQuery (you can use SQL to feed data in to the model).
For many cases using full power of Tensorflow (i.e. using DNNs) is not necessary. This is especially true for structured data. On the other hand, most of your time will be spent on preprocessing and cleaning the data which would be much easier in SQL in BigQuery.
So you have two options here. Choose based on your needs.
P.S.: You can also try using BigQuery Reader in Tensorflow. I don't recommend it as it is very slow. But if your data is not huge it may work for you.
I'm currently working on a machine learning problem and created a model in Dev environment where the data set is low in the order of few hundred thousands. How do I transport the model to Production environment where data set is very large in the order of billions.
Is there any general recommended way to transport machine learning models?
Depends on which Development Platform your using. I know that DL4J uses Hadoop Hyper Parameter server. I write my ML progs in C++ and use my own generated data, TensorFlow and others use Data that is compressed and unpacked using Python. For Realtime data I would suggest using one of the Boost librarys as I have found it useful in dealing with large amounts of RT data for example Image Processing with OpenCV. But I imagine there must be an equivalent set of librarys suited to your data. CSV data is easy to process using C++ or Python. Realtime (Boost), Images (OpenCV), csv (Python) or you can just write a program that pipes the data into your program using Bash (Tricky). You could have it buffer the data somehow and then routinely serve the data to your ML program and then retrieve the data and store it in a Mysql Database. Sounds like you need a Data server or a Data management program so the ML algo just works away on its chunk of data. Hope that helps.