Towards MLOps: A Case Study of ML Pipeline Platform

The development and deployment of machine learning (ML) applications differ significantly from traditional applications in many ways, which have led to an increasing need for efficient and reliable production of ML applications and supported infrastructures. Though platforms such as TensorFlow Extended (TFX), ModelOps, and Kubeflow have provided end-to-end lifecycle management for ML applications by orchestrating its phases into multistep ML pipelines, their performance is still uncertain. To address this, we built a functional ML platform with DevOps capability from existing continuous integration (CI) or continuous delivery (CD) tools and Kubeflow, constructed and ran ML pipelines to train models with different layers and hyperparameters while time and computing resources consumed were recorded. On this basis, we analyzed the time and resource consumption of each step in the ML pipeline, explored the consumption concerning the ML platform and computational models, and proposed potential performance bottlenecks such as GPU utilization. Our work provides a valuable reference for ML pipeline platform construction in practice.