MLOps

MLOps is an extention of DevOps (development and operations) practices of putting in production machine learning (ML) models. It is focused on automation and monitoring at all the steps of ML system construction: creating reproducible pipelines, reusable software environment, testing, integration, deployment and model performance monitoring.

There are many additional components in MLOps in comparison to DevOps, due to different nature of Data Science and Software development projects. In Data Science:

• many different programming languages and frameworks are used, thus the projects don't have monolithic structure.
• there is an experimentation step during development of models, where the performance of the models and used datasets need to be tracked.
• testing needs to include the model, data and the software components.
• pipelines can be long and complex and deploying them can require automating many steps that were done manually during the construction of the system.
• once in production, the performance of the model needs to be constantly monitored, since change in incoming data can change decrease the performance. In this case, the model should be re-trained.

MLOps is a practice for collaboration and communication between data scientists and operations professionals to help mannage production ML lifecycle. Similar to the DevOps and DataOps appoaches, MLOps looks to increase automation and improve the quality of production ML while also focusiong on business and regulatory requirements.