Last updated: November 3, 2022.
ZenML 0.6.2 brings you the ability to serve models using MLflow deployments as well as an updated CLI interface! For a real continuous deployment cycle, we know that ZenML pipelines should be able to handle everything — from pre-processing to training to serving to monitoring and then potentially re-training and re-serving. The interfaces we created in this release are the foundation on which all of this will build.
We also improved how you interact with ZenML through the CLI. Everything looks so much smarter and readable now with the popular rich library integrated into our dependencies.
Smaller changes that you’ll notice include updates to our cloud integrations and bug fixes for Windows users. For a detailed look at what’s changed, give our full release notes a glance.
♻️ Continuous Deployment with MLflow
The biggest new feature in the 0.6.2 release is our integration with the parts of MLflow that allow you to serve your models. We previously added MLflow Tracking, but now hook into the standard format for packaging machine learning models so that you can deploy them for real-time serving using a range of deployment tools. With the new integration you can locally deploy your models using a local deployment server.
This is the foundation for the obvious next useful step: non-local deployments using tools like KServe and BentoML. (Community votes on that directed us first towards MLflow, but we realize that there are several other options that are commonly used.)
As part of this new feature, we added a new concept of a ‘service’. The service extends the paradigm of a ZenML pipeline to now cover long-running processes or workflows; you are no longer limited to executing run-to-completion pipelines or mini-jobs. With services you can therefore serve the an artifact created by a pipeline and have it reflected in a running component that you can interact with after-the fact. For machine learning, this is what gives us continuous model deployment.
The MLflow deployment integration means you can implement a workflow — for example — where you train a model, make some decision based on the results (perhaps you evaluate the best model) and immediately see the model updated in production as a prediction service.
We’re really excited about the production use cases that this feature enables. To learn more, check out the new documentation page we just included to guide you in understanding continuous training and continuous deployment. The mlflow_deployment example is also a great way to understand how to use this new feature. (Use the CLI to explore and interact with the examples.)
Improving our CLI with rich
If you’ve been using the ZenML CLI utility for a while, you’ll know that it was functional but maybe not always delightful. We’ve taken a bit of time to make it more pleasant to use from the user perspective. We used ‘rich’ to add a visual uplift to most user-facing parts of the zenml terminal interface.
Tables are easier to read, spinners conceal log messages that you didn’t really need to see, and tracebacks from errors raised while using ZenML are now much more feature-filled and easy to parse. Now that we’ve added rich into our dependencies it will be easier to continually improve the CLI going forward.
We’ll be writing more about how we integrated with rich on the blog in the coming days, so stay tuned for that!
🗒 Documentation Updates
As the codebase and functionality of ZenML grows, we always want to make sure our documentation is clear, up-to-date and easy to use. We made a number of changes in this release that will improve your experience in this regard:
- Ensure quickstart example code is identical across everywhere it is referenced.
- Added core concepts back into the main glossary (sorted alphabetically and made concise).
- Added cloud-specific guide for deploying pipelines.
- Inside the codebase itself, removed some parameters specified in docstrings that no longer existed in code.
- Various spelling and typo corrections.
➕ Other Updates, Additions and Fixes
- Our test suite is now more robust. We run our integration tests on
kubeflow(as well as on the local stack), and integration tests run in separate virtual environments for each integration test. - We added some extra parts to our PR template, which you’ll reach when you contribute to the ZenML codebase.
- We fixed a bug where the CLI wasn’t working if you didn’t have
gitalready installed. (This mainly applies to Windows machines, and our bug fix doesn’t apply to any of thezenml example…functionality, since that requiresgit.) - Added various logging and informative error messages for edge cases.
- Fixed a bug where an IPython REPL would crash when running examples or code that visualized data.
- We now automatically activate integrations when we are unable to find stack components.
- We now handle the failure of workflows for cases where
ModuleNotFounderrors are raised.
🙌 Community Contributions
We received a contribution from Rasmus Halvgaard, in which he fixed a number of documentation errors and redundancies in our codebase. Thank you, Rasmus!
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