MLOps Fundamentals: Pipelines, Monitoring, Versioning

Introduction: Automating the ML Lifecycle

You've deployed a model manually. Now imagine doing this weekly, or daily, with 50 models. MLOps (Machine Learning Operations) automates and standardizes the entire ML lifecycle.

MLOps = ML + DevOps + Data Engineering

Key Insight: Manual ML workflows don't scale. MLOps brings software engineering discipline to ML: version control, testing, CI/CD, and monitoring.

Learning Objectives

  • Understand MLOps principles and benefits
  • Set up ML pipelines
  • Implement CI/CD for ML
  • Track experiments and models
  • Automate training and deployment
  • Monitor models in production

1. MLOps Principles

Core Pillars

1. Automation

  • Data ingestion and validation
  • Model training and evaluation
  • Deployment and serving
  • Monitoring and retraining

2. Versioning

  • Code (Git)
  • Data (DVC, LakeFS)
  • Models (MLflow, Model Registry)
  • Environment (Docker, conda)

3. Continuous X

  • CI: Continuous Integration
  • CD: Continuous Deployment
  • CT: Continuous Training
  • CM: Continuous Monitoring

4. Monitoring

  • Data drift detection
  • Model performance degradation
  • Infrastructure health
  • Business metrics

2. ML Pipeline Architecture

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3. Experiment Tracking

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4. CI/CD for ML

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5. Model Monitoring

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6. Data Versioning

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Key Takeaways

MLOps automates the ML lifecycle from data to deployment

Pipelines chain together data processing, training, evaluation, and deployment

Experiment tracking enables comparing models and reproducibility

CI/CD automates testing, training, and deployment

Monitoring detects performance degradation and data drift

Versioning tracks code, data, and models for reproducibility


What's Next?

Next lesson: Model Optimization – quantization, pruning, distillation, and inference acceleration!