Vantage AI MLOps Training

Day 1: Workflow orchestration with Airflow

1. Installation

Make sure you have Helm and a local Kubernetes instance running. Then, run:

./install.sh

Also, create a virtual environment and install the requirements.txt inside.

2. Inspect Hello World DAG

1. Inspect the dags/hello_world.py file and try to understand it
2. Port-forward the web server service via Lens or via

kubectl port-forward -n airflow svc/airflow-webserver 8080:8080

3. Explore the Airflow UI in your browser
4. Activate the hello_world DAG and explore it

3. ML Pipeline Orchestration

The ml folder contains scripts for training an ML model and making predictions with it. They are packaged in an image called ml-vantage. The scripts have arguments for input and output paths.

Use the KubernetesPodOperator to create an ML pipeline DAG. It should run on a weekly basis. It should first train an ML model and then make predictions with it. Use the provided PersistentVolumeClaim ml as external storage.

After building the DAG, update the DAGs in Airflow with the following command:

./update-dags.sh

Then, activate the DAG and get it to work. You can exec into the ml-pvc-inspector pod in the airflow namespace to inspect the PersistentVolumeClaim. You can peek at the solution in the dags folder if you get stuck.

Day 2: Experiment tracking with MLflow

1. Setup

Follow the setup from day 1. If you have day 1 installed on your machine already, the following will be sufficient

kubectl apply -f k8s.yaml

There are also new dependencies in the requirements.txt, so you should update your virtual environment for local development.

2. Upgrading the scripts to MLflow

Port-forward the mlflow and S3 services via Lens or via

kubectl port-forward -n mlflow svc/mlflow 5000:5000
kubectl port-forward -n mlflow svc/s3 9000:9000

Upgrade ml/train.py such that the training runs are recorded in MLflow.

• To be able to connect to the services on kubernetes, export the following environment variables

export MLFLOW_TRACKING_URI="http://localhost:5000"
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=foo
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=bar
export MLFLOW_S3_ENDPOINT_URL="http://localhost:9000"

• Define the experiment using mlflow.set_experiment
• Start a new run using with mlflow.start_run
• Log the model using mlflow.sklearn.log_model
• Add other interesting information to MLflow

Also upgrade ml/predict.py such that it pulls the correct model from MLflow. You could use mlflow.search_runs to find the relevant run, and mlflow.sklearn.load_model to load the model.

Lastly, orchestrate the new scripts via Airflow by upgrading the ml pipeline DAG from last week. Inside the pods, the URLs to MLflow and S3 are different:

MLFLOW_TRACKING_URI="http://mlflow.mlflow:5000"
MLFLOW_S3_ENDPOINT_URL="http://s3.mlflow:9000"

If you get stuck, you can look at ml/mlflow_solution and dags/mlflow_solution.py for inspiration.