Metaflow Revolutionises Data Science at Netflix by Simplifying ML Workflows

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Published on July 26th, 2023

Table of Contents

Introduction

Data scientists desire to practise their field. After all, the phrase is right there in the title. But data scientists are often expected to perform tasks other than developing machine learning models. For instance, designing data pipelines and allocating resources for ML training. That is a poor strategy for keeping data scientists content after a Data Science Course. There was a need to maintain the happiness and productivity of Netflix's 300 data scientists. So, Savin Goyal, team leader for the Netflix ML infrastructure team, oversaw the creation of a new framework in 2017. This framework abstracts away some of these fewer data science-related activities. It frees up their time so they can devote more of their time to data science. In 2019, Netflix made the framework, known as Metaflow. This framework was available as an open-source project.

How An Organisation Can Use MLOps

Any business's ML platform must be capable of:

Support for several ML model formats and associated dependencies, produced by various tools.
There should be the infrastructure resources required for the ML lifecycle.
Offer flexibility in deployment across edge, cloud, and on-premises.
To clarify and audit model usage, make sure model governance is in place.
Achieve integrity and security for the model.
Retrain production models on newer data using the pipeline, techniques, and code useful to construct the original
DevOps, Ops, and MLOps professionals should get visual tools.
Keep an eye on the models to ensure they are operating well, following rules, and not harming anyone.

Train the employees through an online machine learning course or data science training to follow these practices.

Why Meta Flow at Netflix?

Netflix, as a business, understands the importance of offering a shared platform. It helps to increase the productivity of its data scientists. Also, it is necessary to overcome internal system complexity for ML to be effective. Netflix's data scientists, also known as ML engineers, may now connect to various internal data sources. They can have access to a lot of computational power via Metaflow. Data scientists can automate these processes using Metaflow to focus on training. They can work on inference pipelines at scale on Netflix's AWS-based cloud infrastructure. Also, one can work in this area after a Data Science Certification Program.

Data scientists may document their work with Metaflow MLOps features. It ensures a crucial component that is sometimes missing in traditional ML, reproducibility of problems by Metaflow. It is possible through features like code snapshots and other functionalities. Users of Metaflow can reduce expenses by contrasting several cloud instance types inside a specific ML workflow. This is besides its repeatability and automation features. Assume that a data scientist wants to train an ML model using a sizable dataset stored in Snowflake. There is a memory-intensive analysis procedure, followed by model training on GPUs. Next is deploying the model for inference using fewer resources. One can divide these workflow stages into various instance types via Metaflow, which lowers costs.

Metaflows’ adaptability is a key feature as well. The ML frameworks that data scientists choose to use are easy to apply. For instance TensorFlow, PyTorch, sci-kit-learn, XGBoost. Although there is a graphical user interface (GUI), the main way to interact with Metaflow is by using decorators in Python or R scripts. Many Data scientists already have a working understanding of Data Science and are looking for a solution. They need a solution that puts them in charge while removing infrastructure issues. Such decorators empower the scientists by regulating the flow of code execution at runtime. A Machine learning certification will let you know about frameworks.

How Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) are implemented at Netflix

On Netflix, there are lots of ML applications. The business must enhance the user experience through personalization. It underlies everything from catalogue authoring to content streaming quality optimisation. This involves show recommendations, and show production recommendations. You will also get help in the detection of abnormalities in a user's sign-up procedure.

Consider the use case for their advice as an illustration. This use case encompasses:

Making a member's homepage unique,
Advising viewers on what to watch,
Displaying works of art (that each movie title can have in common with a spectator).

With this use case, the business aim is to foretell what a user will want to view before they do. Their ML solution's implementation success will depend on the goals. You can prepare yourself for a career in companies like Netflix through online machine-learning training.

The Use Of Models In Real-World Settings

The Netflix ML team uses models in both online and offline modes, much like Uber does. Besides using these techniques, they also deploy near-line models. They don't need real-time inference but are instead sent to an online prediction service. Besides the online prediction service, this mode makes the system responsive to client requirements. The team validates and trains the model offline before deploying them. A system for internal publication and subscriptions, often known as pub/sub is there. It helps to deploy the offline models as a prediction service online. Those who have done the best machine learning course, are experts in creating models.

During the development phase of Netflix's recommendation systems, historical viewing data helps in training and verifying various models. They are then tested offline to check if they deliver the desired performance. If so, the trained models go through live A/B testing to see if they function well in real-world situations. Depending on the situation, the models can also compute results offline via batch inference. Learn more about the structure of Netflix's recommendation algorithm by visiting this page.

The Netflix team created Metaflow, an open-source ML framework-independent library. It uses it to assist data scientists' experiments by building ML models and handling data. It provides an API that builds ML pipelines as a service. Their Machine Learning (ML) workloads use the Metaflow API to connect with AWS Cloud infrastructure service. It includes storage and computing, Netflix's development notebooks (Polynote). There are other user interfaces in a series of "flow" phases too.

Meson is the internal workflow orchestration engine for scheduling model training jobs. Meson moves models from development to production by orchestrating workflows. Also, it keeps models fresh in production and performs online learning for fluctuating workloads. The Meson engine handles task scheduling and submits training ETL (extract, transform, and load) operations to Spark clusters. It interfaces with Mesos (which is their infrastructure engine for cluster administration). Also, it provides live monitoring and logging of these workflows and metrics of the workflow. Meson interfaces with the internal Runway model lifecycle management system for rapid prototyping. Hence deploying training pipelines to production, and testing new models. Many enthusiasts go for an IIT Data Science Course to master these skills.

Our Learners Also Read: 15 Most Popular Data Science Tools With What Is Unique About Them?

Tracking The Performance Of The Model In Use

Before the aggregation of online features from the client side is sent to Netflix's recommendation engine. Then it monitors the bad data quality using internal automated monitoring. It uses alerting technologies to recognise data drift.Netflix uses an internal tool called Runway to track and notify the ML teams of out-of-date models in production. When making recommendations, the ground truth data gathers whether a user watches the suggested video. It then compares the model's predictions to track the model's success. Runway also maintains a model monitoring chronology. It includes the model's publishing and alert history as well. This covers the time when an alarm was resolved and model metrics. This aids in identifying model staleness and potential issues for triaging and debugging. It is possible to compare the model's forecast with the actual data and model metrics. Hence users may establish staleness alerting by selecting a threshold to look for model staleness.

The Runway tool also allows the Netflix team to see the application clusters. These clusters ingest a model's prediction down to the model instance. It contains the model information to track system metrics and model loading errors.They compare the qualities of the created data with the baseline attributes for this measurement. Further, they use dashboards to track the quality of the data produced. This makes it simple for the monitoring tool to identify drift or mismatch.The tool detects mismatch and the underlying distribution in the attributes of the input data. It computes the distributions for each attribute. The tool contrasts it with baseline data attributes. This could be data from a few days to weeks ago or the actual training data. For more expertise in data handling, one can apply for an IIT Data Science course.

The Management Of Model Lifecycle Iterations

The runway manages all these models in production. Thousands of ML models power Netflix's use cases, including its customization engine. One can store model-related data, like artefacts and the model lineage in Runway. It is Netflix's model lifecycle management system. Also, Runway offers the ML team a user interface to search and visualise model structure and information. This is for a simple understanding of models in production or about to be deployed to production. There is smooth navigation inside the Runway page and connectivity with other Netflix systems. Hence management is also made simpler because you can debug and troubleshoot models. Model management becomes easier with the tool's extra role-based view of models.Systems that log facts are also in place at Netflix. Their ML teams may develop and test models using fresh data while offline.

The Netflix team uses an internal A/B testing infrastructure to conduct their experiments. It gathers metadata about the test so teams can search and compare tests. Also, it checks if the implemented model and the model available to people are useful. The Netflix team also uses internal auditing libraries and SparkSQL. This is helpful to examine each attribute of a dataset and assess its quality. It allows the team to define a threshold for alerting and triaging. The developer team should receive a notification for auditing. For instance, when it finds an abnormality in the duration of content playback. If you join a course like an Online Data Science Course, you may know how to handle and test the data.

Conclusion

Netflix and many other firms' creation and broad use of Metaflow is evidence of the need to streamline ML operations. It gives data scientists more control, increases productivity and job satisfaction. Metaflow can streamline non-data science chores, standardise procedures, and save expenses. It enhances team cooperation and knowledge sharing. There may be repercussions for the future of data science and the market. So Metaflows commercial success highlights the growing significance of tools. These tools enable effective and repeatable ML workflows. Join the IIT Guwahati data science course to explore many possibilities of data science.