MLOps level 2: CI/CD pipeline automation

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For a rapid and reliable update of the pipelines in production, you need a robust automated CI/CD system. This automated CI/CD system lets your data scientists rapidly explore new ideas around feature engineering, model architecture, and hyperparameters. They can implement these ideas and automatically build, test, and deploy the new pipeline components to the target environment.

Figure 4. CI/CD and automated ML pipeline.  
This MLOps setup includes the following components:  
Source control
Test and build services
Deployment services
Model registry
Feature store
ML metadata store
ML pipeline orchestrator
Characteristics of the stages discussion.  

Figure 5. Stages of the CI/CD automated ML pipeline.  
The pipeline consists of the following stages:
Development and experimentation: You iteratively try out new ML algorithms and new modeling, where the experiment steps are orchestrated. The output of this stage is the source code of the ML pipeline steps that are then pushed to a source repository.  

Pipeline continuous integration: You build source code and run various tests. The outputs of this stage are pipeline components (packages, executables, and artifacts) to be deployed in a later stage.  

Pipeline continuous delivery: You deploy the artifacts produced by the CI stage to the target environment. The output of this stage is a deployed pipeline with the new implementation of the model.  

Automated triggering: The pipeline is automatically executed in production based on a schedule or in response to a trigger. The output of this stage is a trained model that is pushed to the model registry.  

Model continuous delivery: You serve the trained model as a prediction service for the predictions. The output of this stage is a deployed model prediction service.  
Monitoring: You collect statistics on the model performance based on live data. The output of this stage is a trigger to execute the pipeline or to execute a new experiment cycle.  The data analysis step is still a manual process for data scientists before the pipeline starts a new iteration of the experiment. The model analysis step is also a manual process.

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