Models in Natural Language Processing are fun to train but can be difficult to deploy. The size of their models, libraries and necessary files can be challenging, especially in a microservice environment. When services should be built as lightweight and slim as possible, large (language) models can lead to a lot of problems. With a recent real-world use case as an example, which runs productively for over a year and in 10 different languages, I will walk you through my experiences with deploying NLP models. What kind of pitfalls, shortcuts, and tricks are possible while bringing an NLP model to production?

In this talk, you will learn about different ways and possibilities to deploy NLP services. I will speak briefly about the way leading from data to model and a running service (without going into much detail) before I will focus on the MLOps part in the end. I will take you with me on my past journey of struggles and successes so that you don’t need to take these detours by yourselves.

This talk presents a novel approach to MLOps that combines the benefits of open-source technologies with the power and cost-effectiveness of cloud computing platforms. By using tools such as Terraform, MLflow, and Feast, we demonstrate how to build a scalable and maintainable ML system on the cloud that is accessible to ML Engineers and Data Scientists. Our approach leverages cloud managed services for the entire ML lifecycle, reducing the complexity and overhead of maintenance and eliminating the vendor lock-in and additional costs associated with managed MLOps SaaS services. This innovative approach to MLOps allows organizations to take full advantage of the potential of machine learning while minimizing cost and complexity.

I will present the challenges we encountered while migrating an ML model from batch to real-time predictions and how we handled them. In particular, I will focus on the design decisions and open-source tools we built to test the code, data and models as part of the CI/CD pipeline and enable us to ship fast with confidence.

Everybody knows our yellow vans, trucks and planes around the world. But do you know how data drives our business and how we leverage algorithms and technology in our core operations? We will share some “behind the scenes” insights on Deutsche Post DHL Group’s journey towards a Data-Driven Company. • Large-Scale Use Cases: Challenging and high impact Use Cases in all major areas of logistics, including Computer Vision and NLP • Fancy Algorithms: Deep-Neural Networks, TSP Solvers and the standard toolkit of a Data Scientist • Modern Tooling: Cloud Platforms, Kubernetes , Kubeflow, Auto ML • No rusty working mode: small, self-organized, agile project teams, combining state of the art Machine Learning with MLOps best practices • A young, motivated and international team – German skills are only “nice to have” But we have more to offer than slides filled with buzzwords. We will demonstrate our passion for our work, deep dive into our largest use cases that impact your everyday life and share our approach for a timeseries forecasting library - combining data science, software engineering and technology for efficient and easy to maintain machine learning projects..

At the boundary of model development and MLOps lies the balance between the speed of deploying new models and ensuring operational constraints. These include factors like low latency prediction, the absence of vulnerabilities in dependencies and the need for the model behavior to stay reproducible for years. The longer the list of constraints, the longer it usually takes to take a model from its development environment into production. In this talk, we present how we seemingly managed to square the circle and have both a rapid, highly dynamic model development and yet also a stable and high-performance deployment.

The nightmare before data science production: You found a working prototype for your problem using a Jupyter notebook and now it's time to build a production grade solution from that notebook. Unfortunately, your notebook looks anything but production grade. The good news is, there's finally a cure!

The open-source python package LineaPy aims to automate data science workflow generation and expediting the process of going from data science development to production. And truly, it transforms messy notebooks into data pipelines like Apache Airflow, DVC, Argo, Kubeflow, and many more. And if you can't find your favorite orchestration framework, you are welcome to work with the creators of LineaPy to contribute a plugin for it!

In this talk, you will learn the basic concepts of LineaPy and how it supports your everyday tasks as a data practitioner. For this purpose, we will transform a notebook step by step together to create a DVC pipeline. Finally, we will discuss what place LineaPy will take in the MLOps universe. Will you only have to check in your notebook in the future?