In development you basically want the experience to be as lightweight as possible. For most machine learning engineers that means working in a native Python environment defining functions or executing cells within a notebook. Existing orchestrators require you to run sort of like long running services in order to do their job. So even if you want this really tight lightweight development loop when you're experimenting with your models, want the ability to isolate things and store intermediate results in S3 instead of a local file system. The first priority for us has been this very lightweight local development experience where you can execute your entire pipeline just in a REPL without loading any external processes.
Summary
Building a machine learning model one time can be done in an ad-hoc manner, but if you ever want to update it and serve it in production you need a way of repeating a complex sequence of operations. Dagster is an orchestration engine that understands the data that it is manipulating so that you can move beyond coarse task-based representations of your dependencies. In this episode Sandy Ryza explains how his background in machine learning has informed his work on the Dagster project and the foundational principles that it is built on to allow for collaboration across data engineering and machine learning concerns.
Interview
- Introduction
- How did you get involved in machine learning?
- Can you start by sharing a definition of "orchestration" in the context of machine learning projects?
- What is your assessment of the state of the orchestration ecosystem as it pertains to ML?
- modeling cycles and managing experiment iterations in the execution graph
- how to balance flexibility with repeatability
- What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen orchestration implemented/applied for machine learning?
- What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on orchestration of ML workflows?
- When is Dagster the wrong choice?
- What do you have planned for the future of ML support in Dagster?
Contact Info
Parting Question
- From your perspective, what is the biggest barrier to adoption of machine learning today?
Closing Announcements
- Thank you for listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. The Data Engineering Podcast covers the latest on modern data management. Podcast.__init__ covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used.
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Links
The intro and outro music is from
Hitman's Lovesong feat. Paola Graziano by
The Freak Fandango Orchestra/
CC BY-SA 3.0
