MLOps on the Databricks Lakehouse

Unifying DataOps, ModelOps, and DevOps

This repo demonstrates an end-to-end MLOps workflow on Databricks that follows the deploy code reference architecture discussed in the Big Book of MLOps and at Data & AI Summit 2022.

Since the release of this repo, Databricks has built a official MLOps template, currently in private preview. If you would like to express interest and enroll in a private preview version of this template, please complete this questionnaire.

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The feature engineering, training, deployment and inference pipelines are deployed as a Databricks Workflow using dbx by Databricks Labs. GitHub Actions are used to orchestrate the movement of code from the development environment, to staging, and finally to production. This project can be configured to use a single Databricks workspace for all three environments, or multiple workspaces.

This project can be run as a pure Python package, or as notebooks. The current configuration is to deploy Databricks Workflows that run notebooks, but if you want to deploy Python wheels please see Niall Turbitt's original repo. If you are curious about the structure of the codebase, please watch the demo portion of the recording from DAIS.

Preventing customer churn

The business case at hand is a churn prediction problem. We use the IBM Telco Customer Churn dataset to build a simple classifier to predict whether a customer will churn from a fictional telecommunications company.

Pipelines

This repo possesses the following pipelines:

• demo-setup
  • Deletes existing feature store tables, existing MLflow experiments and models registered to MLflow Model Registry, in order to start afresh for a demo.
• feature-table-creation
  • Creates new feature table and separate labels Delta table.
• model-train
  • Trains a scikit-learn Random Forest model
• model-deployment
  • Compare the Staging versus Production models in the MLflow Model Registry. Transition the Staging model to Production if outperforming the current Production model.
• model-inference-batch
  • Load a model from MLflow Model Registry, load features from Feature Store and score batch.

Demo

The following outlines the workflow to demo the repo.

Set up

1. Fork https://github.com/RafiKurlansik/daiwt-mlops
2. Configure Databricks CLI connection profile
   • The project is designed to use 3 different Databricks CLI connection profiles: dev, staging and prod. These profiles are set in daiwt-mlops/.dbx/project.json.
   • Note that for demo purposes we use the same connection profile for each of the 3 environments. In practice each profile would correspond to separate dev, staging and prod Databricks workspaces.
   • This project.json file will have to be adjusted accordingly to the connection profiles a user has configured on their local machine.
3. Configure Databricks secrets for GitHub Actions (ensure GitHub actions are enabled for you forked project, as the default is off in a forked repo).
   • Within the GitHub project navigate to Secrets under the project settings
   • To run the GitHub actions workflows we require the following GitHub actions secrets:
     • DATABRICKS_STAGING_HOST
       • URL of Databricks staging workspace
     • DATABRICKS_STAGING_TOKEN
       • Databricks access token for staging workspace
     • DATABRICKS_PROD_HOST
       • URL of Databricks production workspace
     • DATABRICKS_PROD_TOKEN
       • Databricks access token for production workspace
     • GH_TOKEN
       • GitHub personal access token

Starting from scratch

To start over or delete all of the resources in a given workspace, run the demo-setup pipeline. As part of the initial-model-train-register multitask job, the first task demo-setup will delete any existing resources, as specified in demo_setup.yml.

Workflow

1. Run PROD-telco-churn-initial-model-train-register multitask job in prod environment

   • To demonstrate a CICD workflow, we want to start from a “steady state” where there is a current model in production. As such, we will manually trigger a multitask job to do the following steps:

     1. Set up the workspace for the demo by deleting existing MLflow experiments and register models, along with existing Feature Store and labels tables.
     2. Create a new Feature Store table to be used by the model training pipeline.
     3. Train an initial “baseline” model

   • There is then a final manual step to promote this newly trained model to production via the MLflow Model Registry UI.

   • Outlined below are the detailed steps to do this:

     1. Run the multitask PROD-telco-churn-initial-model-train-register job via an automated job cluster in the prod environment
        • NOTE: multitask jobs can only be run via dbx deploy; dbx launch currently).

        dbx deploy --jobs=PROD-telco-churn-initial-model-train-register --environment=prod --files-only
        dbx launch --job=PROD-telco-churn-initial-model-train-register --environment=prod --as-run-submit --trace
        

        See the Limitations section below regarding running multitask jobs. In order to reduce cluster start up time you may want to consider using a Databricks pool, and specify this pool ID in conf/deployment.yml.

   • PROD-telco-churn-initial-model-train-register tasks:

     1. Demo setup task steps (demo-setup)
        1. Delete Model Registry model if exists (archive any existing models).
        2. Delete MLflow experiment if exists.
        3. Delete Feature Table if exists.
     2. Feature table creation task steps (feature-table-creation)
        1. Creates new churn_features feature table in the Feature Store.
           • NOTE: ibm_telco_churn.bronze_customers is a table created from the following dataset. This will not be automatically available in your Databricks workspace. The user will have to create this table (or update the feature-table-creation config to point at this dataset) in your own workspace.
     3. Model train task steps (model-train)
        1. Train initial “baseline” classifier (RandomForestClassifier - max_depth=4)
           • NOTE: no changes to config need to be made at this point
        2. Register the model. Model version 1 will be registered to stage=None upon successful model training.
        3. Manual Step: MLflow Model Registry UI promotion to stage='Production'
           • Go to MLflow Model Registry and manually promote model to stage='Production'.

2. Code change / model update (Continuous Integration)

   • Create new “dev/new_model” branch
     • git checkout -b dev/new_model
   • Make a change to the model_train.yml config file, updating max_depth under model_params from 4 to 8
     • Optional: change run name under mlflow params in model_train.yml config file
   • Create pull request, to instantiate a request to merge the branch dev/new_model into main.

• On pull request the following steps are triggered in the GitHub Actions workflow:
  1. Trigger unit tests
  2. Trigger integration tests
• Note that upon tests successfully passing, this merge request will have to be confirmed in GitHub.

3. Cut release

   • Create tag (e.g. v0.0.1)

     • This can be done in the GitHub UI, or from the command line of your local machine
     • git tag <tag_name> -a -m “Message”
       • Note that tags are matched to v*, i.e. v1.0, v20.15.10

   • Push tag

     • git push origin <tag_name>

   • On pushing this the following steps are triggered in the onrelease.yml GitHub Actions workflow:

     1. Trigger unit tests.
     2. Deploy PROD-telco-churn-model-train-deployment-inference-workflow job to the prod environment.
     3. Launch PROD-telco-churn-model-train-deployment-inference-workflow

   • These jobs will now all be present in the specified workspace, and visible under the Workflows tab.

4. Inspect PROD-telco-churn-model-train-deployment-inference-workflow job in the prod environment

   • In the Databricks workspace (prod environment) go to Workflows > Jobs to find it.

   • Model train job steps (telco-churn-model-train)

     1. Train improved “new” classifier (RandomForestClassifier - max_depth=8)
     2. Register the model. Model version 2 will be registered to stage=None upon successful model training.
     3. MLflow Model Registry automatic transition to stage='Staging'

At this point, there should now be two model versions registered in MLflow Model Registry:

- Version 1 (Production): RandomForestClassifier (`max_depth=4`)
- Version 2 (Staging): RandomForestClassifier (`max_depth=8`)

5. Inspect the model-deployment task (Continuous Deployment) in the prod environment

   • Model deployment task steps:
     1. Compare new “candidate model” in stage='Staging' versus current Production model in stage='Production'.
     2. Comparison criteria set through model_deployment.yml
        1. Compute predictions using both models against a specified reference dataset
        2. If Staging model performs better than Production model, promote Staging model to Production and archive existing Production model
        3. If Staging model performs worse than Production model, archive Staging model

6. Inspect model-inference-batch task in the prod environment

   • Batch model inference steps:
     1. Load model from stage=Production in Model Registry
     2. Use primary keys in specified inference input data to load features from feature store
     3. Apply loaded model to loaded features
     4. Write predictions to specified Delta path

Limitations

• Multitask jobs running against the same cluster
  • The pipeline initial-model-train-register is a multitask job which stitches together demo setup, feature store creation and model train pipelines.
  • At present, each of these tasks within the multitask job is executed on a different automated job cluster, rather than all tasks executed on the same cluster. As such, there will be time incurred for each task to acquire cluster resources and install dependencies.
  • As above, we recommend using a pool from which instances can be acquired when jobs are launched to reduce cluster start up time.

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Development

While using this project, you need Python 3.X and pip or conda for package management.

Installing project requirements

pip install -r unit-requirements.txt

Install project package in a developer mode

pip install -e .

Testing

Running unit tests

For unit testing, please use pytest:

pytest tests/unit --cov

Please check the directory tests/unit for more details on how to use unit tests. In the tests/unit/conftest.py you'll also find useful testing primitives, such as local Spark instance with Delta support, local MLflow and DBUtils fixture.

Running integration tests

There are two options for running integration tests:

• On an interactive cluster via dbx execute
• On a job cluster via dbx launch

For quicker startup of the job clusters we recommend using instance pools (AWS, Azure, GCP).

For an integration test on interactive cluster, use the following command:

dbx execute --cluster-name=<name of interactive cluster> --job=<name of the job to test>

For a test on an automated job cluster, deploy the job files and then launch:

dbx deploy --jobs=<name of the job to test> --files-only
dbx launch --job=<name of the job to test> --as-run-submit --trace

Please note that for testing we recommend using jobless deployments, so you won't affect existing job definitions.

Interactive execution and development on Databricks clusters

1. dbx expects that cluster for interactive execution supports %pip and %conda magic commands.
2. Please configure your job in conf/deployment.yml file.
3. To execute the code interactively, provide either --cluster-id or --cluster-name.

dbx execute \
    --cluster-name="<some-cluster-name>" \
    --job=job-name

Multiple users also can use the same cluster for development. Libraries will be isolated per each execution context.

Working with notebooks and Repos

To start working with your notebooks from Repos, do the following steps:

1. Add your git provider token to your user settings
2. Add your repository to Repos. This could be done via UI, or via CLI command below:

databricks repos create --url <your repo URL> --provider <your-provider>

This command will create your personal repository under /Repos/<username>/telco_churn. 3. To set up the CI/CD pipeline with the notebook, create a separate Staging repo:

databricks repos create --url <your repo URL> --provider <your-provider> --path /Repos/Staging/telco_churn